Filling A Much-Needed Void

In the past few days I have had several e-mail requests from people looking for copies of my first book, Big Big Love: A Sourcebook on Sex for People of Size and Those Who Love Them.

Big Big Love is currently out of print. It has been out of print for a year or so. There are no current plans to bring it back into print.

Best Transgender Erotica, which I coedited with Raven Kaldera, is likewise out of print.

What this means:

• The only copies of Big Big Love or Best Transgender Erotica currently available for sale are copies which were either a) purchased by booksellers prior to the time that the book went out of print, or else they are b) used copies.
• This means that they are being sold outside the publishing-industry loop of in-print books that involves the author, the publisher, and the distributor. They are being sold in the out-of-print sector of the book business, to which neither I nor the publishers or distributors have any connection.
• Neither I nor the publisher have anything to do with the prices being asked for remaining copies. When it comes to sales of out of print books, booksellers are free to ask for whatever they think the market will bear.
• Neither the publisher or I are receiving any profits from sales of the remaindered or used copies, regardless of how much you may pay for one, so please do not assume that it is my greediness, or that of the book’s publishers, that is to blame for the rather elevated prices that are apparently being asked for copies of the book. I repeat: I do not see any income from sales of the book at this point. The high prices being asked are not connected to me.
• I am sorry, but I cannot help you find a cheap copy of any of my out-of-print books. I don’t know any more than you do about where such a thing might lurk.

Thank you for your interest in my work. I hope that you will be sufficiently intrigued to purchase copies of my other books that are still in print.  On that note, I point out that my most recent book, Virgin: The Untouched History, has just come out in paperback.

A Star Chart for the Rose Bride, pendant. Pearls and coral on sterling silver wire.

Hanne Blank, 2008. Collection of the artist.

From today’s Kaiser Family Foundation’s daily Women’s Health Report:

Exhibit A:

A House-Senate conference committee on Thursday approved a fiscal year 2008 appropriations measure that would include a $27.8 million increase in funding of abstinence education programs, CQ Today reports. The legislation combines a Labor-HHS-Education spending bill (HR 3043) with a spending bill for the Department of Veterans Affairs and military construction (HR 2642) (Wayne, CQ Today, 11/1).

Exhibit B:

Sixty-seven percent of U.S. adults favor allowing public schools to provide contraceptives to students, including 37% who favor providing them only to children whose parents have consented and 30% who favor providing them to all students who ask, according to a recently released Associated Press-Ipsos poll, the AP/Columbus Dispatch reports.

The poll, taken from Oct. 23 to Oct. 25, found that minorities, older and lower-income people are most likely to prefer requiring parental consent, while those who support no restrictions primarily are younger and from urban or suburban areas. People who oppose providing birth control at school are more likely to be white and higher-income earners. The majority of respondents said young people should have access to birth control either beginning at age 16 or age 18, compared with one-third who chose age 15 or younger.

The poll also showed that 51% of people believe sex education and birth control are more effective ways to reduce teen pregnancies than emphasizing abstinence and morality, compared with 46% who prefer moral and abstinence messages. About 64% of minorities and 47% of whites consider sex education and birth control the most effective method. Nearly seven in 10 white evangelicals said they prefer abstinence, as well as about 50% of Catholics and Protestants. About 62% of all people surveyed believe providing birth control reduces the number of teen pregnancies.

… The survey involved telephone interviews with 1,004 adults.

Dear Closeted Conservatives,

I’ve been holding back from saying anything because really, I have better things to do, but clearly, you need some help. Yes, I mean you, and you and you and you and you.

You need some help because you keep getting yourselves into trouble when really, all you’re trying to do is get your knobs shined. And I agree with you, it’s a free country, and assuming everyone is of legal age and consents, there is nothing at all the matter with wanting to bust a nut.

Nevertheless, this is something that thousands, even millions of people succeed in doing at every hour of the day, every day of the year, without falling on their faces in some egregious stupid way and getting to enjoy a steaming helping of public humiliation in the newspapers.

If they can do it, so can you. Here are some tips to help you get the lovin’ you crave without all the blackmail, arrests, career damage, and public shaming you don’t.

Tip #1: Come out, come out, whatever you are!

Seriously, this is why a lot of people come out of the closet. It’s not because there is some inbuilt queer mandate to share the details of one’s sex life. Coming out, more than anything else, simply makes for accurate perceptions. When folks know you’re queer, they’re not shocked, surprised, offended, or prone to run hooting to the paparrazzi when you turn out to be… queer. All you have to do is belly up to the adult responsibility bar and say “hey, I’m gay” or “hey, I’m bisexual” or even “hey, I’m a horndog and an opportunist and I say any port in a storm.” Really it’s just a matter of honesty. You know, being straightforward and truthful about the things you do and will do, the things you care about, the things you stand for. Or behind, as the case may be, I’m not judgmental. Practice in front of a mirror until you can say “I am queer” without twitching. Then try it at a press conference.

Tip #2: If you can’t be bothered to come out, at least try not to look like you’re an utter jackass and an idiot to boot when you get caught.

Let’s face it, gentlemen. People who suddenly can’t remember that they fucked someone whom they just fucked look like tramps. Stupid tramps. And no, no one is going to buy a roofie sob story when you’re still wearing the trashy polyester lingerie under your suit, li’l buckaroo, so you might as well stand up straight and wear your trashy lingerie with pride. (It worked for Tim Curry.)

People who change their tune when confronted with the fact that they were having, or even merely seeking, sex with someone not their lawfully wedded heterosexual wife look like furtive schoolboys trying to hide the Playboy they shoplifted before the teacher finds out.

People who inexpertly cruise public tearooms expecting not to get busted, then wave their title and office around thinking that it’s going to get them off the hook, look like they have a gigantic entitlement problem, and believe that a title or an office makes them above the law.

People who claim they weren’t behaving in an inappropriately sexual manner when they clearly were, or who claim that they weren’t lying about their sexual lives when they clearly were, just look like lying liars who lie badly. This goes double, maybe quadruple, for anyone who is gonna stand up and say with a straight face that they thought offering someone a blowjob was a good way to avoid getting jumped. Seriously, guys, if you’re gonna lie, learn how to lie like Nixon did. Have some style.

Tip #3: Don’t hold up your wives and children as proof that you’re not queer.

As the unfortunate example of Brit and K-Fed attested, any two people can get married in this country, as long as they are not both of the same biological sex. Hell, you DOMA-sucklers are all about that. But there isn’t a marriage license in the world that’ll spontaneously combust if a queer person puts a signature on it. Furthermore there is no Wasserman test to sniff out any of that evil queerness before the Justice of the Peace will let you say “I do.”

Say it with me, gentlemen: Marriage is not proof of heterosexuality, it is a legal contract.

Similarly, queer people have kids. All the time. They even did it before artificial insemination. Many of them, in fact, did it through the expedient venue of actual legal marriage (see above). Queerness does not in fact create reproductive malfunction. It just means that you may be less likely to procreate by accident.

Repeat after me: Heterosexuals don’t make people. People make people.

For those of us who already know these things, it doesn’t make you look any better when you stand there next to your thin-lipped, grimly present wives, your children beside you barely able to keep themselves from rolling their eyes at being dragged into yet another idiotic photo op on behalf of Daddy’s career. It makes you look like you’re an asshole who disrespects and lies to his family and then shamelessly uses them to bolster his own sagging ratings in the public opinion polls. Remember Tip #1? Yeah. Your family doesn’t like it when you don’t have the cojones to be honest up front, either.

That’s it!  Be honest up front, don’t lie and cheat and squirm if you get caught, and stop disrespecting your families.   That’s all it takes!   See, it really is all about good old fashioned American values after all.

Good luck!

Your friend,

Hanne

Just noting that the submissions period has opened for Project: QueerLit, a fantastic indie literary competition for unpublished novelists who have novels with queer content to enter (writers may or may not be queer themselves).

The Project: QueerLit (http://www.projectqueerlit.com/) contest celebrates and brings media attention to unpublished authors of queer writing and opens doors for publication of their work. The contest is open to any unpublished author of an English-language novel with queer and/or bent content.

Authors may not be previously published or contracted to be published for a novel in any form. Previously published chapbooks, nonfiction, shorter fiction and collections of short fiction, and other work published in multi-author collections, magazines, etc. does not disqualify them. A novel with queer or bent content refers to a novel of any genre or blending of genres with LGBTIQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex, and Queer), or with alternative themes, situations, voice, or characters. The author (and the novel) does not have to be lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersexed, or queer to be considered. Queer in this context can also mean a bent or outsider worldview.

All novel submissions are “blindly” reviewed (without knowledge of author’s identity) and rated (on originality, storyline, voice, and, characterization) by members of the Project: QueerLit Advisory and Review Committee, and another applicant.

From these ratings, the top-rated group of twenty-five Semi-Finalists, three Finalists, and a Winner(s) are selected and awarded.

Additionally, aside from the ratings, at least one novelist will be selected from all of the submissions as the Grand Prize winner(s) and awarded.

Full Disclosure: I am a member of this year’s Advisory and Review committee, meaning that I am one of the judges.  No, it won’t help you win.  But I figured I should mention it.

Please forward / repost this at your leisure.

L’shana tovah! to those of you joining me in saying hello to the year 5768.  May we all be inscribed for a year  full of joy, learning, sweetness, and blessings.

Ramadan mubarak!  to those of you for whom the holy month is just beginning.  May it be an uplifting and fulfilling experience from beginning to end, and full of delights (and I don’t just mean the iftar kind).

And for the rest of you… I hope that you are doing wonderfully!

Today in the Cupcake Factory, we learned something important.

Namely, that when you take a recipe for a layer cake, and you decide to bake up the batter as cupcakes, you may get a whole lot more cupcakes than you were really shooting for.

In this instance, 45 cupcakes, when I was really thinking that 24 would be about right.

So, in the end…

I made 36 cupcakes with vanilla buttercream and glittery rainbow sugar for M to take to work tomorrow for his belated birthday treat to share with his coworkers.

And Malcolm ate one, as quality control, because I’m trying to keep concentrated doses of sugar out of my mouth for the most part because it tends to make me first hyper, then psycho, then feel somewhat ill.

What happened to the other 8?

I dolled them up with extra swirls of buttercream, since I had more than I needed, and sprinkled them with chocolate sprinkles, and took them down the street to my neighbor Erica, who is a single mom who runs her own housecleaning firm and has a toddler to run herd on.  She was very happy to get them and demolished one in the time it took her to say thank you and chitchat for a few minutes.  I am told that the buttercream is particularly good.  I imagine that’s because of a) real butter, b) real vanilla, and c) a touch of almond extract for depth of flavor.

I’m not sure I ever thought I was going to grow up to be the kind of person to sorta randomly take plates of cupcakes down the street to the neighbor’s house, just because, but apparently I have done.

It’s not so bad.

As a writing exercise, I have recently taken to writing daily ten-sentence biographies of historical figures. It’s a lot of fun, because knowing that I have only ten sentences in which to talk about someone means–even if I make them long Dickensian sentences–that I’m not going to be anything remotely approaching comprehensive. So I can be a little flippant, a little silly, a little weird. But by my own internal rules, I still have to get salient historical details into the thing, too, it’s not fair to do nothing but riff.

Since I have been enjoying them, I thought I’d perhaps post some. Here’s one from yesterday.

Louis Daguerre (1787 – 1851)

There are no baby pictures of Louis Daguerre for the simple if frustrating reason that he hadn’t been born yet.

He seems to have been a boring baby, though, so perhaps it’s best that we don’t know too much.

In fact, he only became particularly interesting when he grew up, and pitched his promising career as an agent for the tax bureau—I’m sure I can’t imagine why—to go into painting scenery for operas.

He also painted scenery just as scenery, as it was a simpler time and one could induce people to pay money to come into a hall and look at big backdrop-style paintings of faraway places like Rome, or Jerusalem, or London, at least presuming that the people in question weren’t from Rome, or Jerusalem, or London, and thus not capable of ruining it for others by pointing out that that Daguerre fellow had got the Coliseum, or the Tower for that matter, on the wrong side of town.

His attempts to take his show on the road were aborted by a rather nasty fire, though, which was quite embarrassing, so he settled down to the equally unsafe task of tinkering with volatile chemicals in an effort to work out how to fix images projected through a lens onto a surface.

There were other people working on this problem too, and one of them, called Nicéphore Niepce, wrote a letter to Daguerre in which he described his technique for exposing metal plates coated with a delectably light-sensitive mix of asphalt and oil of lavender to a lens image, then plunging them into an invigorating bath of acids, and asked Daguerre if he wanted to plunge with him sometime.

Daguerre thought this sounded jolly, and he and Niepce plunged merrily away until Niepce suddenly passed away due probably to an overabundance of consonants in 1833, leaving Daguerre with six more years of solo plunging before he was able to unveil the world’s first photograph to the French Academy of Sciences in 1839.

This he called the Daguerrotype, which was neither terribly accurate of him nor terribly fair but is probably for the best because really, people have enough trouble with pronouncing it the way it is.

The French government, quick to recognize a useful invention—lots of people went on holiday in France even then, it was sure to be a growth industry—promised him an annual income if he’d only tell them how it was done.

He did, but not before he patented it in Britain in order to cut off a British inventor who had invested a small fortune in trying to develop a version of the same thing, whereupon he sat back and enjoyed a lucrative, and very French, retirement.

© Hanne Blank 2007, All Rights Reserved.

There’s this poor girl who keeps sending email to my spam filter who says that her boyfriend’s penis is so small it keeps slipping out when they have intercourse.

Then today she sent me email saying that her boyfriend’s penis was too large for her mouth, so she can no longer give him oral sex.

Some questions have come to mind:

a) Do you suppose this is in reference to the same man?

b) Do you suppose they’re both really from the same woman? They do have the same name. But different e-mail addresses.

c) Or is the girl two-timing the guy with the small penis?

d) If she is, does he know?

e) If he knows, does he care?

f) Do you think he gets angrier about her two-timing him, or about her disclosing personal information about his genitals to random people on the Internet?

g) If these are two separate men, do you think the second guy believes that the girl is only with him because of his gigantic schlong?

h) If these are two separate men, do you think the first guy believes the girl is only sleeping with the second guy because of his gigantic schlong?

i) Which of these two guys is more likely to be willing to get out of bed early to go down to the corner for bagels and coffee and a newspaper in the morning?

j) Which of these two guys actually pays more attention to the woman’s sexual pleasure? (I am not the only woman of my acquaintance to have perceived that guys with Louisville Slugger-sized whangdoodles often fail to perceive the need to have any actual, y’know, technique.)

k) Has her mother met both of these guys?

i) Which of them was nicer to her mom?

j) Would you call the second email a complaint, or a boast?

k) Do you think the guys who buy penis enlargement products are more afraid of ending up in the first scenario or the second?

l) Do you think the guys who buy penis enlargement products would buy them if there were a realistic chance that using said products would mean they’d never get another blowjob?

m) Do you think the second guy used penis enlargment products, or is he just a ringer brought in for the occasion?

n) Hasn’t anyone told this poor girl about Kegel exercises?

o) Hasn’t anyone told this poor girl that God gave men hands and tongues for a reason?

p) Seriously, most of the women I know (and I know some very highly sexed women) don’t get quite so exercised about the sizes of their partners’ penises, so why is this woman so fixated?

q) Do you think this woman suffers from penis envy?

r) Would it help matters, do you suppose, if they had a threesome?

s) Or would that only make things worse?

t) Did this woman meet either of her two partners through online personal ads?

u) If so, were they on some “adult” personals site, or on a regular one?

v) Did the guys send her dick pix to help her make her choice?

w) Why does this woman feel so compelled to share the details of her personal life with strangers, anyway?

x) And where did she get my e-mail address?

y) Is she related to the bored Russian girl who wants me to go look at her pictures?

z) Is it perhaps the same man, and the same woman, and indeed the same penis, only the woman has an extraordinarily capacious coochie and a preternaturally tiny mouth?

Looking into the newly-painted bathroom.  Farrow & Ball’s Lulworth Blue on the walls, Cornforth White on the woodwoork, and though you can’t see it in this picture, Slipper Satin on the ceiling. Inspector Qiao is trying to decide whether he approves.