I've admired Susie Bright's candid, direct, and wide open sexual expression for a great many years, from her early writing in the lesbian tabloid "On Our Backs" right through to her current blog [...]. Here is a woman who took on a number of risky and controversial causes, especially the celebration of a bawdy and earthy female bisexuality with a primarily lesbian identity, against the anti-sex prophets of what I would call the right wing of the feminist movement--people like Andrea Dworkin and Katherine McKinnon and much of the male-bashing academic feminist establishment. Dworkin, who died in 2005, once argued that heterosexual intercourse itself was a form of rape.
I'm also one of her thousands of Facebook friends and regard her site as one of the best portals to the good things going on on the internet--politically, socially, and erotically. Like me she regards most internet pornography as tediously bad and knows how to distinguish between honesty and in-authenticity in sexuality better than anyone that I know. As a long time editor of "The Best American Erotica" and many other collections of sexually-oriented writing, she also knows how to distinguish between good imaginative writing and porno hack jobs.
She has now published a memoir called "Big Sex, Little Death," and it is a revelation, because it goes beyond the persona created in her erotica and gives us a detailed portrait of the cerebral, radical, flesh and blood person she is and where the components that make up her identity come from.
Susie Bright, the name is perfect for her--kind of oozing intelligence and light--is the only child of Elizabeth Halloran and William Bright, born in Arlington, Virginia in the late 1950's. Her parents were academics and separated shortly after her birth, then divorced. She remembers a high school English teacher who attributed her "out of line" behavior to the fact that she was the product of a broken home. In the years since, a "broken home" has become more the norm than the exception, and the phrase itself seems as antiquated as eight track cassettes. Nonetheless, she was deeply affected by her parents' divorce, especially by her mother's erratic and isolated ways. She describes a horrific event early along when her mother drove her to the edge of the iced-over Saskatchewan River after the twelve-year old Susie had lost her glasses and was told by her mom, "you won't need them in the bottom of the river," and then when the confused child asked where they were going responded "I'm driving us into the river."
It's no wonder that Bright writes "If you were to ask me what the happiest days of my life were, I would say the day that my daughter was born...and the first week I spent reunited with my dad." This happened when she was in her early teens and her mother had asked her father to take care of her permanently. Living with her father was liberating. Both her sex life and her political life began at the tender age of fourteen; she tells us casually on page 85 that after she became involved with a socialist high school paper appropriately called The Red Tide, "I also started having sex. Not with anyone at school, but with the socialists, the ones with all the ideas in their heads." Her political and sexual identities were formed early and have been sustained in unison ever since.
"Big Sex, Little Death" is divided into three sections--the first dealing with her childhood, the second with her adolescence, and the third with all of her adulthood. This gives the book a bit of a skewered feel. Two thirds of the volume deals with a bit more than one third of her life, while the last third of it covers some thirty-three years. (Bright turns 53 this year). This may be because the last third covers the Susie Bright we generally know about--one of the founders of "On Our Backs" and the editor or author of a shelf-full of erotic writings. She was "present at the creation" of a new kind of feminist-based sensuality and a witness to the San Francisco-based sexual turmoil of the 80s and 90s. She chronicles both the AIDS epidemic and the sexual revolution in some detail, and the devastation that both left in their wake. We know a great deal about the former, but less about the latter, and it's surprising to encounter the litany of deaths and suicides associated with the young women who worked in San Francisco sex clubs (p. 243) as well of being reminded of the fratricide committed by Jim Mitchell, one of the famous Mitchell Brothers who ran the notorious O'Farrell Theater in the 70's and 80's and produced porno films including "Beyond the Green Door," which was one of the biggest porno-pop hits of the period.
The only thing we don't get to find out too much about is her long-term relationship with the man in her life (Jon) and particular details about her interactions with her daughter Aretha, now a young woman. Yes, she does offer some good advice about parenthood: "Don't hit them. Don't lie to them. Respect their privacy and your own," but there's little more. Well, I certainly respect her right to privacy in these areas, but many of her readers might like to know about how it was for Aretha growing up with such a sexually explicit mom, and whether her ongoing connection with a man in her life has made her monogamous, or if their relationship is an open one. These seem important omissions for a woman who has made most of her life an open book, but I'm sure there are more than a few pages yet uncut.
Nonetheless, the best thing about Susie Bright's writing is the clarity and vividness of her style as well as it's very personal tone. She has the gift of writing as if she's sitting across a table from you and talking with you casually, even about outrageous things like her mother's threatening to kill her and commit suicide and having threesomes at age fifteen with her girlfriend Danielle, age fourteen, with a series of "older men." Listen: "I felt safe and bold with Danielle--I'd do things with her I'd never do by myself. We could seduce anyone; we could get out of--or into--any situation that we wished. When we were alone she told me that my kissing was terrible, that Americans didn't know how to kiss. She ran a bath for us, and when we got into the tub to practice, we turned on the shower, too, the water pouring down our heads....Men were intimidated by us, which we thought was funny. Funny, but great leverage. For the first couple of months of my sex life, I was too intimidated to do anything alone with a guy--Danielle was my big dog, my fearless leader, the one I could temper and reason with. I loved her. Sex with her, alone, made me shiver. We never talked about it." I quote this at length to give you a sense of the flavor of Bright's precise, talkative, and unadorned prose. Simple declarative sentences, precise detail, and secretive matters you feel like she is sharing just with you. Of course she isn't, but that's the illusion created by this kind of exactitude. This is unquestionably Bright's best and most important book.
