Victoria Brooks is the author of Silicone God (MOIST Books/House of Vlad) a queer sci-fi novel. Jack Skelley is author of The Complete Fear of Kathy Acker (Semiotext(e)), and Myth Lab: Theories of Plastic Love (Far West Press). They exchanged love letters along a mind-bending line of flight to reach an understanding of what makes hawt sex writing.
Victoria: Jack, I’m very into your writing. You get the difference between writing about good sex, and good sex writing. I need words that slime into out-of-this-world fuckable bodies, and the stench of Jack Halberstam’s queerly failing fucks taking flight. Both of your books made me forget I’m reading—do you know what I mean? The good stuff—like watching forbidden fruit juicing into words, forming perverse bodies for the mind. I also found these books arousing in that Chris Kraus sense of wanting to dig at the words for clues about you. This is where I get stumped. You’re a cis hetero guy, and yet I know your work has mass queer and sex-worker appeal. I’ve thought about it and here’s my theory: like me, you love crafting writing untainted by the need to cater to the mass readership of the big commercial publishers. Maybe good sex writing is necessarily activist, extreme, radical—and by virtue of that, always queer? Maybe that’s why I fell for it.
Jack: I’m blushing! I’m very into your writing too. I think I’ve used this as a pickup line at readings myself. It reminds me of the epistolary book I’m Very Into You (also Semiotext(e)) co-authored by pioneer queers Kathy Acker (though Acker was often ferociously het) and trans writer McKenzie Wark). Your description of “good sex writing” – forbidden fruit of bodies morphing for dirty minds – encapsulates Silicone God. All those future-fied limbs, lips and linguistic hot licks stretch the limits of “queer.” It’s hot. Or hawt: the sexualized version. Is good sex writing always “queer”? Since I’m cis and hetero, this is not my conclusion to make. But then we come to the paradox you cite, that I have a queer following. It was evidenced again at a reading produced by sex-worker writer Lily Lady in L.A., a young lesbian writer on the bill (Michelle Jane Lee), who straight-up confessed she’s a fan! Afterwards we bonded over her poem invoking NY School of Poetry (and gay) icon Frank O’Hara: Being Gay and In Love With Frank O’Hara in Los Angeles. So how does your (re)definition of good sex writing as “queer” and “extreme” explain this attraction? After solving this riddle, may I confess my fixation with trans femmes? And dollification?
Victoria: You may. Because I think it leads us to an answer to the riddle. Myth Lab reads like a love letter to the doll and their adornments, and also to trans divinity (a concept appearing in Silicone God, too). I would also supplant “fixation”, with “adoration,” or even “worship”—which are essential parts of dollification as a queer form of sexualised play. Dollification is essentially a loving process of adorning the body with cute little outfits, make-up and wigs, liquid latex, wild acrylic nails. And in good sex writing, there’s a worship of the body through literary craft. A queer feminist idea based on Gilles Deleuze’s work—Logic of Sense in particular, which I’ve always loved—is that good sex writing takes flight and fabricates a new body for the mind, which is titillated as we read. Maybe it’s not in its being extreme, or only that—it’s that good sex writing is queer and loving, and makes a new body for our own ailing flesh and minds—perhaps a kind of doll. The author, through their craft, dollifies the reader through fun power-play. Yes? Or too much of a stretch? (Innuendo intended).
Jack: A new body for the mind infuses cyborg feminism (as in Donna J. Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto) with the accelerationism embraced by dollification, while titillating (your term) both author and reader. Taking off from your queer feminist reading of Deleuze, I recently read Jean Baudrillard’s The Ecstasy of Communication, which applies concepts of hyperreality to sexuality via pornography. From there, it’s a short step to the bodily simulacrums of dollification. And when you bathe these empowerment movements in terms of “worship” and “adoration” you redeem (or rationalize?) them into realms of love. What could be more positive, more worthy? (And why do I still feel guilty? Catholicism?) Especially after your turn-on terms: cute little outfits, makeup, provocative poses. Yum. Finally, you insert the issue of “power play,” as if to say good sex writing is a form of S/M. This may explain how Silicone God toys with readers’ biases/preferences about not just sexuality, but humanity. But its hyper simulacra—including reptilian mutations—stretches into body horror. Is that a turn-on?
Victoria: I love how you took flight and then ended up guilty! For me, reading (and writing) wasn’t always a playful activity. It was serious, or liberatory—but not anything to do with sex. I think this is why, when I discovered good sex writing—especially Nicholson Baker’s House of Holes, then leading to Anais Nin and Henry Miller—but eventually ending up with the reptilian mutation weird kind of stuff of Unreal Sex (Cipher Press)—it felt powerfully naughty. I was obsessed. It was then that I also felt able to write the way I wanted to—perhaps having a Constance Debre Love me Tender moment, since this time also coincided with my own coming out. I felt released from reading and writing as an intellectual pursuit, into an embodied labour of love. I'm meandering towards your question about body horror— yes, there's something about good sex writing that can take a turn into the horrific, but always in a loving way. There’s a kindness, generosity and acceptance that—as someone who has experienced sex as a site of trauma in the past—is like a balm. Safe yet limitless simulacra-play is revolutionary. To be able to capture the horror and rage as well as the pleasure of sex is a loving gift from a good sex author—a bell hooks (all about love) kind of loving, which has space for rage and resistance. Yet the importance of good sex writing doesn’t translate into availability and visibility. Do we think this is because of a lack of bravery in the publishing industry? The political climate?
Jack: I admire (envy?) your redemptive notion of trauma. Nin and Miller are classic gateway quasi-porn lit. (I feel like Miller is overdue for reappraisal.) I love Debré’s eruptive libido! Especially in Playboy where the narrator “objectifies” women far more than Miller, or me, or you, ever did. But we still have time left in our writing careers, so, let a thousand pages bloom with mental dollification. Myth Lab has passages that narrate subs or masochists embracing/neutralizing their pain. But this returns us to your initial distinction: preferring “good sex writing” to reading about good sex. This suggests one of my fave truisms: Good writing is not about something; it is that thing. However, consider this further distinction: Good sex writing may also be about bad sex. Embarrassing, anxious, longing, lonely. Where the author is conscious of their cringe. Your Shae character in Silicone God exhibits a Hamlet-like, self-doubting version of this trait, before she cosmically and carnally achieves an inner divinity, “like a proper whore. And a proper queer.” My Myth Lab and Fear of Kathy Acker narrators endure parallel quests before embracing their fate through the power of writing, the power of art, the power of love.
Victoria: I wondered what would happen to my doll-in-mind after meeting you in L.A. for AWP last week. Maybe the author god would collapse into a mere human and then the whole thing would shatter, but no. I guess it’s love. Like you say, embracing the cringe. A British author coming to LA, jet-lagged, plunged into a culturally and literarily alien; sun-drenched, syrup-soaked massive world where I felt like a nervous waffle giving my first American reading from Silicone God of Shae getting fucked by the Surgeon while lusting for her best friend. I fell in love, often, in L.A. I checked Myth Lab—the writing still hits, except now it has an extra layer of kindness, like when you gave me a lift to the Silverlake Lounge. Maybe I stray off-topic, and this seems to not be about sex writing, but it is, right? Good sex writing doesn’t make the author into a god—it turns them radically human and allows the reader to feel free—and I would argue, sexily safe enough— to fuck themselves.
Jack: Here’s where I insert my (bad) AWP joke: Its acronym is a version of that song by Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion: WAP – or Wet Ass Pussy. I too fell in love. The world may be consumed in flames of fear and fascism, but they can never take away love of good sex writing… or our dolls.
