Exposed: An Interview with Susie Bright

 

DAVID: It took me a while to figure out how to read your book because it was so different in style from other books you’ve written. This book is not a collection of essays. It’s more like hanging out with Susie Bright while she talks in a meandering way about various clusters of topics and thoughts. Is that how you intended for it to read?

SUSIE: Well, it was a stipulation of my contract that I write a continuous book, rather than a series of essays, and also a challenge for myself that I had been avoiding for a while. Previously, I had always written essays or short stories, pieces with the journalistic demand that you make your point, argue it, and get out in 2000 words or less. The idea for this book was not to reach the end so quickly, but rather to unfold in much the way that a novel unfolds. I wanted it to feel continuous as you go from one chapter to the next.

D: Were you nervous about taking on this new pace?

S: Well, since I had never written to keep a thread going for so long before, there was this sense of, “Can I do it? Can I do it?” But, by the time I was halfway through I felt like I could write like this forever. It appealed to me. I got a lot of confidence.

I wanted to act as if I were taking people into my parlor, saying, “Haven’t you always wondered about these things? Haven’t you wished you could talk about sex outside some very political, pedantic, defensive atmosphere full of arguments about who’s right and who’s wrong. Don’t you wish you could just open this up and talk about sexual honesty, about what’s happened to you, what you might want to do, what you’re afraid of?” So I wanted to just go from there, where I’m not backing you into a corner, you’re not backing me into a corner, but there’s a lot of room for consciousness-raising nevertheless.

D: How did you decide which would be the major issues of the book?

S: I ended up abandoning the idea that I could objectively decide what was most important, and just decided to deal with what was most important to me. I knew that I wanted to deal with family and sexuality, spirituality and sexuality, disclosure and sexuality. Those were the biggest themes to me, and I felt that if I could get a good grip on them in this book I would have accomplished something.

D: Sexual individuality seems like another main focus.

S: Yes. I guess I shouldn’t say “disclosure” — it sounds like a bank statement. What I mean by that is the sense of saying, “Look, this is who I am. It took me a while to figure it out, and I’m probably still going to figure out a few more things, but I’m really not like any sexuality that’s on the shelf to be bought.” Authentic sexuality just isn’t like that.

I go on tirades about advertising and titillation and how there really is absolutely no honest or individual discussion of sex in mainstream entertainment or culture. That’s probably what I’m most angry about in this book.

I’ve always been rebellious about materialism dictating one’s personal choices. The whole notion that “If only I had this, I would be sexy.” The urge to buy something to assuage my own feelings of not being sexy. I’ve certainly dipped into that pool myself, but my whole hippie past made me resistant to that kind of retail devotion.

I think the classic thing for women is to follow the clarion call of commercialized beauty to find some sense of sexual power. As long as you keep buying the right makeup, the right outfit, you can keep some sense of being a sexual person going. But it’s so false and so plastic, beyond any feminist critique. It’s deeper than a feminist issue; it’s just such an incredible distraction from finding out what’s really inside yourself.

I was thinking about all this again just this morning. My daughter, Aretha, had left Joani Blank’s book, Kids’ First Book About Sex, out on the table. I was reading the part that talks about what a sexy person is. It says something like “a sexy person is someone who likes touching and being touched, thinks well of themself and likes their body.” It was so heavy, but those three sentences, and a Marcia Quakenbush illustration, summed it all up. It’s sounds so dumb and so simple, but how many people can say that they really feel those three things?

D: You were saying that you specifically wanted this book to be conversational rather than argumentative.

S: Conversational rather than confrontational. People who have seen me in person are not surprised by the tone of this book because it reads a lot like talking to me. People who haven’t met me, who have read a political essay or heard some rumor about me, have a much rougher, harder image of what I’m like. I’ve heard people say a million times, “I can’t believe what you look like. I thought you were going to be in full leather drag and cracking a bull whip. I thought you were going to be merciless, or I hoped you were going to be merciless!” They really expect some Camille Paglia character.

The truth is that I get to be fierce in some of my political writing in a way I never am in person. It’s like an alter ego, the part of me that wants to be unequivocal and say, “This is the way it is, and if you don’t like it, you can all jump in the lake!” That sexier, sassier part of me is much more flagrant in my writing than I feel in person.

For this book, I wanted the scare-you-out-of-your-shoes factor to not even be an issue. And I didn’t want to get caught up in buzzwords, which is why I deal with the notion of discarding language and labels very early in the book. It’s such a waste of time to worry about this kind of thing. Are they gay? Are they straight? Are they into s/m? Did she use the word “cunt?”

I felt that I had to lay down certain things at the beginning of the book. The part about how you do have an erotic story inside you. I don’t care whether you’ve thought about it or not, it’s waiting right there. As soon as you open the door, it’s going to spill out. And if it’s going to spill out anyway, why worry about the words you use, how you articulate it, how you express it? Let’s not get hung up on the words and the categories; let’s just let it all out of the bag.

D: If this book is a conversation, who is it a conversation with? Who do you think of as your audience?

S: My most fervent fans tend to be 20-year-old young women and 40-year-old men. Sometimes I feel like just holding a big matchmaking event. They both so desperately want to be free, want to say, “Here I am, I’m not going to let anybody tell me what to do any more.” It’s coming from different places in the middle-aged men than the young women, but the feeling is much the same.

The middle-aged men typically have had many chances to be powerful in many different ways, but they often feel that they’ve been living a lie and they’ve had it up to here with the double life. They don’t want to apologize. They don’t feel like conforming any more. They want to come out of the closet that they like sex, that they like porn, that it’s not a crime to want more than one person to be sexual with in your life, that monogamy isn’t what it’s cracked up to be.

The young women are coming from the place of just having an orgasm for the first time. They are barely out of their family’s protection. They’re determined to lose their virginity, or they’ve just lost it. They also are highly dubious of romance. They don’t want to be like mom, don’t want to be tied down.

So they’re both having this “Let Freedom Ring!” experience, which is why they often identify with me as a soulmate when they read my work.

D: What about the 40-year-old women and the 20-year old men?

S: The toughest crowd for me to crack is straight women my own age. Why? Because I’m stealing their daughters and their husbands, the two things they’re trying to protect, every time I write. “You’re encouraging my daughter to take risks I don’t want her to take, and you’re making my husband think he can do whatever he wants, after all I’ve done to keep the family together.” I’m personalizing it, but I think I’m threatening to women my own age, straight women, who feel that I’m being irresponsible, really irresponsible.

Meanwhile, the young men are saying, “Well, what do I need you for? Who are you, anyway, and why do I need to know or care? I’m very busy. My masculinity and my sexuality are fine, thank you. Would you please back off. I’m interested in cute young women that I want to impress.” It’s that macho, young Turk thing. They have no interest in me. The only younger men who are interested in me are the ones who are attracted to feminism and sensitivity at an early age.

D: Why do you think the women take such a threatened stance? The older men could say, “You’re telling my wife to be more sexually demanding, someone I’m not going to like or be able to satisfy, and what’s more you’re telling my daughter to be a slut.” But the men are excited by what you say, while the women feel threatened. Why don’t the middle-aged women see you as an opportunity for liberation like the men do?

S: Some of them do, believe me. But most of the women my own age — and I’m separating the dykes because the dykes have a different history that makes them interested in me — but, women with men — well, first of all, they’re still just furious about pornography. They get a whiff of me thinking that porn’s ok and that’s it, the door’s closed. Whereas when older men hear there’s a woman who thinks that porn is ok, they ‘re utterly delighted. “Really?! Really?! You don’t think I’m scum?! Oh, I love you! I don’t think I’m scum either!”

But a lot of women are just furious about pornography and feel like, “What kind of a little traitor are you?” I’m talking about women who are really holding up their end of the Madonna-whore bargain. They’ve rejected the whore and they’re going to be the woman who everyone respects. They’ve made a lot of sacrifices to put their virtue up on this platter, and then I come along and say, “Screw your virtue, it’s just getting in the way.” It’s insulting all the sacrifices and investments they’ve made for the last thirty years.

Now I can say, “I know that’s how it feels at first but the truth will set you free. It’s not too late. You can just rip all this up and have your erotic self-determination and your independence, your own choices — it’s going to feel so much better.” Well, that’s a hard message for many women to hear.

D: And in the lesbian community? Where do you stand with them?

S: I still feel a lot of fondness, love and connection for and from the lesbian community. And nostalgia. A lot of people still think I’m totally lesbian. It’s so funny! It doesn’t matter how many heterosexual fuck stories I write in Salon; it just doesn’t seem to penetrate. People only see one thing, once they get a notion in their heads. Also, a lot of people believe that my lesbian work could be so strong if I were bisexual. When they look at a book like Nothing But the Girl or Susie Sexpert’s Lesbian Sex World, they can’t imagine that I could be more than that, that I could be bisexual. It’s just too challenging.

Lesbians these days seem to have kind of moved on to the pop-culturalization of lesbian heroes. There’s Chastity Bono, and there’s k.d. laing, and there’s Melissa Etheridge. I used to be the most famous lesbian in the world, but when some of the Hollywood closet cases started stepping out, that all changed. They set the tone for lesbians now, which is kind of funny because they’re much more conservative in their public personas than I ever was. They downplay their sexuality.

Like the other day they were asking Melissa Etheridge why she liked Jennifer Lopez so much. And she played it completely straight. She never said, “God, I get such a hard-on looking at her.” Oh, no, it was, like, “I wish I could dance like that” or “If I could only play guitar.” It was just this Platonic, admiring, envy thing — like what a straight girl would say. I thought that was so funny.

There are lesbians who are outraged by my bisexuality, really angry about it, but they hated me before I was bisexual. They hated me for being a femme. They hated me for being identified with s/m. They hated me for making porn movies. They hated On Our Backs. When I was the biggest fucking dyke I could be, they rejected me. They were against all of what they considered to be acting straight. If you’re a femme and you’re with a butch, you’re aping heterosexual relationship. If you think that anybody would really want to make their own porn movie about being a lesbian, you are just brainwashed by the man. On and on and on and on. So, when they catch me in bed having intercourse with a real live man, it’s just one more nail in my coffin, as far as they’re concerned — what they said about me all along.

D: In this book, there’s no sense of you being a lesbian at all.

S: Really??! Oh my god! Well that’s a surprise. Wait, that’s not true. There’s that long story I tell about my friend who joins the Zendick group and how we go on this voyage to deprogram her.

D: Well, there may be a story here and there, but overall there are as many stories about sex with men as there are about sex with women. If you’d never heard of Susie Bright and picked up this book, you wouldn’t ever know you were identified with the lesbian movement and lesbian consciousness, with the lesbian community. But it sounds like you didn’t choose that intentionally.

S: No, it wasn’t self-conscious. What was self-conscious is that when I go over what I’ve written, I’ll ask, “Well, what would a gay man think, reading this? Would he feel like he’d been pushed completely out of the picture? If you were a lesbian reading this, could you identify with any of it?” I ask myself whether people are being pushed out or ignored, whether I have full-spectrum vision of the audience.

D: But that’s in terms of how you see your audience, rather than how they see you.

S: No, that wasn’t part of it. Take as an example when I talk about teaching a gay studies class, where everyone is supposed to write a coming out story, and I start realizing that no one can write a coming out story like they did in the 70s. It’s much more complicated now. You’ve got the guy who is mister gay man on campus and who has bisexual fantasies that are bothering him. You’ve got the young lesbian who’s fighting with her older lesbian mom about what it means to be gay. You’ve got all these different perspectives that show how fucking complicated it is now.

Now, I don’t spend a second explaining why I’m teaching the gay studies class — that I was this big expert on gay life. I just say that I was doing this class and here’s what happened. Why would I discuss it any more than that? I’m not going to go in and brag about my lesbian qualifications.

Sometimes there’s a lesbian issue that comes up. Like Salon used a fun and funny piece about the particularly lesbian interest in Y2K preparation. I’ve always felt that there are things going on in the lesbian world that are really interesting and telling about the rest of humanity, and because lesbians are so timid about asserting themselves, I’m sometimes the only person who talks about those things. There are plenty of gay men who will step up to the bat and say there’s a gay aesthetic or a gay politics, but lesbians are always promoting their political views through something else. Through feminism, traditionally, or through civil rights. It’s that whole nobility of humility thing.

D: I just thought that, at this point in your life, you were moving from the lesbian community to a much larger audience, and in some ways now you can reach more people by not being seen as a lesbian.

S: Well, two things happened when I first got involved in the On Our Backs adventure. One was young lesbians coming out of the closet and having a public profile in a way that hadn’t ever happened before. The other thing was that there was this sexual bohemia that was building — perverts united — the dawning of queerness, the dawning of pansexual perversity.

From the very first issue we did of On Our Backs we got letters and phone calls from non-lesbians saying, “Oh my God, this is so great!” When we first got Utne Reader to agree to advertise us, I wanted us to say, “The most intelligent magazine about sex just happens to be about lesbians.” There was a whole group of people who were attracted to sex in spite of the Reagan administration, a whole group of people who were getting interested in computers and desktop publishing. It was the new underground. Right away they got the point that labels don’t matter and said, “Let’s talk about sex in a different way than we’ve talked about it before.”

That group has just exploded, in numbers and literature, since I’ve been involved with writing about sex, and they always knew where I was coming from. They’re not just straight or gay, or men or women; they’re all sorts of different folks. They congregated initially San Francisco, but now they’re everywhere. They’re the people who are going to poetry slams, the people who are interested in a certain kind of pagan spirituality, merged with sexuality. They’re the faeries and the freaks, and the 90s hippies and the artists. Everyone who, when Nancy Reagan said “Just Say No,” they wanted to say Yes louder than ever. Some of them have been attracted to libertarian politics. Some of them have been attracted to some kind of anarchist or transformative socialist politics.

Those are my friends, and it just so happens that instead of being stamped into extinction we’ve actually grown in number and are having more influence on society, actually, than our numbers would indicate.

D: So it’s sort of the resistance movement against homogenization — people who are struggling for, or demanding, room to be who they are, rather than conform to a mold of sexual expectations.

S: The kind of things these people have in common, aside from wanting to express themselves sexually, is that they feel passionate about the arts and individuality in the arts, and they think the two-party system is just one big voice saying the same thing over and over again. They find all the vice campaigns to be obnoxious. They find the anti-drug propaganda just as disgusting as the anti-sex propaganda. They also have a consciousness about environmental stuff that not everyone shares. They’re turned off to mainstream feminism, but they feel very powerfully about being sick of gender, gender traps, and gender expectations.

So we’re not just a bunch of horny people running around who would go to bed with anybody, although when people on the outside look at us, that’s what they think. I get this cartoon idea all the time. “Susie Bright, who advocates fucking as much as possible….” I guess they want to get laid more often than they are, so they imagine people like me are thinking about huge quantities of sex and crazy positions with lots of gross accessories. That’s their picture of what sexual liberation is and they’re picture of the counterculture. Actually, you could find people in this counterculture group who are quite ascetic in some ways but whose sexual philosophy includes tremendous tolerance and openness of what could be out there.

D: So you’re describing a group of people who are themselves sexually diverse and are also tolerant of diversity of other people. The idea that everybody should get to be whoever they really are, sexually…. Isn’t that essentially what   you advocate: creative, individual sexual expression?

S: That and placing your imagination and your unconscious at the top of the list instead of pressing them down and making them the last things to consider. I say several times in the book that if I never go to bed with anybody ever again, I’m still going to be a wild woman in my own mind.

D: Given that you didn’t want to offer simple remedies, why did you put a sexual manifesto at the end of the book?

S: Oh, that was just to be fun. My friend Shar Rednour said, “This book shows your bossy side, the side of Susie that takes me to a Thai restaurant and says, ‘I’m ordering for you.'” It made me smile because it was true.

In the beginning, I was a little nervous about the idea that I was supposed to tell other people what to do to discover their sexual authenticity. I mean, who am I to tell anyone what to do? But then I realized that people ask me that constantly, and seem to crave my insight. It’s not like they want me to be patronizing, and they certainly don’t want the same claptrap they get from other people about what to buy or what position to use — these really stupid, linear answers to how to improve your sex life.

So I had to ask myself, “What can I say from a philosophical, mind-expanding point of view that would be helpful?” What I would tell a friend who was saying, “I wish I could be more open like you, but I don’t know where to begin.”

I call it a “manifesto,” but the suggestions are very playful. A shorthand list of the things I wanted to say. The premise of the book was to talk to people about how to cultivate and embrace sexual expression, to share what I’ve learned that has made that easy and empowering for me.

D: Was the final book different from what you thought it was going to be when you started?

S: Yeah. I was pretty fearful when I started, but I really liked it at the end. At first I was afraid to be bossy. I thought it would come off wrong. But in the end it had more subtlety, and feeling, and revelation than I anticipated. I think that came from stopping the breakneck speed of writing like a journalist, relaxing, and exploring things a little more. Memories that I thought I knew backwards and forwards took on new meanings when I took the time to write them down. When you write dialogue, you have to remember how each person spoke, so you start to get into their minds and you realize that they must have been feeling all sorts of things that you never even considered at the time. So I felt that I had really been on the couch by the time I got to the end of the book. And I didn’t wonder any more what I could possibly have to say to anybody.

I didn’t want to be a hack. I didn’t want to write a traditional self-help book. On the one hand, I had to talk to people who had never heard of me before, who are attracted to this whole business of sexual openness but who are really nervous about it. On the other hand, I don’t want to bore all my old friends to tears, and it’s news to them that I’m advocating sexual authenticity and honesty. These books where you take on the American sexual gestalt and talk to everybody can be really intimidating. So I had to push all that out of my mind or I would I feel frozen, like I had nothing to say.

D: Why did you choose to take on this broad a book?

S: The sense that I can actually make a difference in the national conversation about sexual expression, sex education, the whole ball of wax, is thrilling. Of course I want to do that! I like having influence. I wish I were in The New York Times every day telling people what I think. I’ve been surprised and then excited by the Little-Engine-That-Could quality of my career. I started out writing for the converted, for everyone who know me, my little milieu. But then things that I wrote would become influential — get quoted and discussed in other places, influence other people.

So I liked having a chance to write a book where I say, “Ok, I’m going to take this very complex situation and tell you what I think the priorities are, and hopefully make an argument that will inspire you to feel, “Yeah, she’s right, those are my priorities too.”