The Unbearables Big Book of Sex

(Unbearable Books/Autonomedia, 2011) Edited by Ron Kolm, Carol Wierzbicki, Jim Feast, Steve Dalachinsky, Yuko Otomo & Shalom Neuman

Reviewed by Amy Holman

Is it masochistic to review an anthology of writing and art on sex when one’s own bed is empty? Can I bear it? Is it merely a relief to be out of it? Neither, actually, since I really don’t matter as much as everyone in The Unbearables Big Book of Sex, writing, creating, or depicted. The writing matters, the poses matter, the perspectives matter. I enjoyed every piece I read no matter its point of view, which is on the outside mostly urban, pretty much all New York City and a bottled history of downtown, underground or nether. The Unbearables Big Book of Sex is complete with personal essays, literary essays, reviews, poems, short short fiction, graphic memoir, drawings, photographs, cartoons, re-lyric of a song, triptych, and collages. There are works by 124 writers, a third of them women, and 62 mostly male artists.

I expected the raunch, the secrets, the sensual descriptions of bodily fluids, the plot point storytelling of the cock, the ease of sex against the hardship of responsibility, the gender identity, and humorous depictions of the dating world. I was surprised by the poignant descriptions of disturbing sex that kept me reading, and by the intellectuals who hooked. The big in the title of this book may have some sexual double entendre, but it seems to be the size to contain every aspect of sex–the erotic, the political, the consensual and the criminal.  These contributors are not just writing about what turns us on, trips us up, or informs our lives, but also what desecrates.

The first quarter of the book relies heavily on stories of the commerce of sex–which is big in the Big Apple–and many depict women as unscathed by it, which if not the norm, is nevertheless a relevant viewpoint. Many of the unscathed women are also writers and artists, another big part of this city. There’s a particularly vivid description by Clayton Patterson in his essay “Hookers I Have Known” — as artistic subject matter — of the avant-garde filmmaker Anne Hanavan, when she used to shoot heroin and draw blood, then smear it on her limbs, on purpose. It was like her glaze. “Eventually she would need to stroll, buy some more drugs, start the whole game over again. And again and again. Out into the dark streets, into a car, the John not realizing she was covered in blood.” Jennifer Blowdryer began her Smut Fests in 1988, “that mixed sex workers performing their own writing and movement to a clientele of thrilled intellectuals, perverts, scenesters, and tricks…” that she writes about in her essay “MEHEC.” In fact, the writing world is here, like nowhere else, a normal scene of life, whether in the short story, “Jimmy Dean: My Kind of Guy,” by Janice Eidus, set at the hotbed of a rural artists colony, that outs the late actor as a playwright poseur; the reminiscence, “Lawrence Ferlinghetti Book Party at the Gotham Book Mart” by Erik La Prade, which manages to be more about a black leather couch than particular booksellers;  the poetry readings Max Blagg attends while certain friends of his elsewhere engage in their offbeat secret passions, in “Nights in White Satin;” or the erotic poems Steve Dalachinsky claims in his erotic poem he doesn’t know how to write.

A book on sex is a book about humanity, and many contributors give a bemused social commentary, as in Elaine Equi’s “Alien Fantasy” –“Just think of them coming all that way/ for nothing more than a closer look/ as if earth were one big peep show/ advertising LIVE FLESH LIVE FLESH/ in undulating neon telepathy.” Or, in “Robert Hershon’s “Mysteries of Marriage” where one couple hears about their friend’s proclivities: “Specifically, it’s redheaded teenage/ boys having sex with fox terriers in/ restaurant basements while he, dressed in a sailor suit,/ watches from a dark corner/ This would make casual sex very hard to come by,/ I would think, but maybe it’s more of a scene/ than I know.” In Roberta Allen’s “Hot,” a poetic, forlorn humor arises in a story about the travails of dressing sexy to please a new, homely boyfriend for a doomed Halloween party where his ex is in attendance: “What I can’t get over is the way he suddenly folds up inside like some mutant origami.” In “Maupin Row,” Ron Kolm recounts his ludicrous attempts at sex with his wife in a freezing Tennessee winter when early in their marriage they volunteered for VISTA, and improvised to be compromised. “Moving around under the electric blanket created a storm of static electricity that snapped and crackled and gave us a continuous series of painful shocks…”

There are sketches of female body close-ups by Rob Couteau, a collage diary by Bruce Weber, photographs of bondage poses, gender identity sculpture, and phallus art by Fusionarts Portfolio, a triptych of gesturing women at parties flanking a phallus by the late, great editor, Barney Rosset, and outlined nudes in a multitude of poses inside the enlarged first letter of every piece of writing.

The hardest to read for its subject of rape is also, in two stories, the most imaginatively told. The graphic memoir excerpt by K-9 and illustrated by Fly, “K-9’s First Time, Part 3: ‘The Boyfriend'” is about violation at age nine by a teenaged neighbor. It includes a few harrowing descriptions of the girl who wanted to fit in with her older friends and didn’t understand what was happening to her: “He told her to lie down and then she couldn’t remember what but maybe she died & he buried her — she could remember a weight on top of her pushing her down & she couldn’t breathe & she could feel all her bones so fragile like maybe she was breaking & he was burying her broken pieces & then she could’t feel anything.” The illustration has her as a skeleton at night with a shadow self trying to escape from beneath. In something that seems reinvented from recent news of the depraved is “Girl in a Box,” by Anna Mockler. She uses a collage of scene and dialogue to glue the fragments of a girl’s memory and present together, letting damnation and godlessness argue in the distance, while the girl, a reader, gradually triumphs, “memorizing heroes of the Revolution.”

That’s my fluttering of the pages, my tease for you. Plenty more to peep in on, here, from Jill Rappaport, Susan Maurer, Denise Duhamel, Thaddeus Rutkowski, Chavisa Woods, Tsaurah Litsky, Steve Cannon, Tom Savage, Susan Scutti, Jim Feast, Sharon Mesmer, Wanda Phipps, Bob Holman, Larissa Schmailo, Mikhail Horowitz, Tuli Kupferberg, Jeffrey Cyphers White, and more.