As a collector of erotica and “curiosa,” an old bibliophile’s codeword for the pornographic, I come across a lot of unusual publications. Some are historical interesting — like a rare pre-Civil War erotic novel — and some are downright silly…

While I buried myself in finishing Desire’s Pursuit – now renamed Training Desire (w00t!) for Ravenous Romance, one of my self-imposed reading assignments was delving into Daniel Bergner’s The Other Side of Desire. The book’s garnered a lot of media attention, from the NY Times to Salon and NPR. Bergner even blogged over at Powells [...]

I’m slogging my way through my final edit on the Next Novel with the most intense effort coming later today after I receive corrections from my proof/first reader. Thus, in-depth blogging won’t resume until next week.
You can, however, find entertainment at the Ravenous Romance website where a new story “Hot Fling” is yours for the [...]

Seems the sex memoir is coming into its own. I’m not talking Jenna or Meliss P, the Euro wondergirl, but more mainstream individuals like Glora Vanderbilt and fomer ballerina Toni Bentley. From a NY Observer review which is no longer on-line,* it would appear that Vanderbilt’s book looks tad vapid, big on breathless wonder and [...]

With conservatism at something of an apex in its push to own America, lock, stock, and barrel, both a novel and a movie about Alfred Kinsey come into being. To me, it almost feels like a cosmic reminder: Don’t forget what we freed ourselves from — those moralistic, repressive post-WW II constraints.
It started whenKinsey published [...]

I use to peak in on the Toronto Inernational Film Festival annually because it proved to be a solid source for discovering films with erotic content. That seems to hold true this year if the NYT is any indication. I’m keen on the seeing the Kinsey movie (although I don’t think Liam Neeson is going [...]

Seeing my short fiction sheparded into print (with more to come). Now, I’m pleased to see Mitzi Szereto’s Foreign Affairs: Erotic Travel Tales on the bookshelves. I’m happy I’ve been a contributor to this series and delighted that Cleis Press has always produced superb covers for the books and Mitzi’s always done an incredible job [...]

They’ve been filling my mind tummy full of good reads. (Ha! Bet you thought I was gonna complain, huh? Ha!) First it reveals enough skeletons and strangeness to move the McGreevey situation clearly into a Peyton Place zone. Which, for me, serves as the cut-off point for following such news. (I’ve got daytime soaps for [...]

Interesting. Here I sit on a rainy spring day, listening to Ashcroft’s 9/11 testimony when this appreciation of the dirty joke crosses my radar. While the essay covers the gamut of dirty joke history, it leads in and out of that history by focusing on Gershon Legman, a lay scholar whose exceptional bibliographic knowledge of [...]

However, I wasn’t 100% sure that his Bears of San Francisco t-shirt meant wildlife or wild life. Got home, Googled it, and sure enough, we’re talking wild life. Castro, no less. Damn. But it’s not like I didn’t give him an opening. After all, I was buying magazines and books that spoke volumes: Lambda Book [...]