Friskbiskit

Ethical Porn

There's a fascinating interiew in Salon with Ethan Hunter, founder of Anteros Media, a socially conscious gay porn company that has a number of innovative features, including sharing a portion of their proceeds with LGBTQ organizations, promoting safer sex by requiring condoms, and using exclusively gay performers. They also have a more intimate approach to filming, with an emphasis on kissing and facial expressions.

We’re working under the very specific notion that the best fantasies are inspired by reality... I find also that I’m having more trouble connecting to porn if I can’t see the guys’ faces. There’s no connection to the people. It’s so anonymous. They’re a bunch of shark attack victims, they have no heads!

And Anteros welcomes female viewers:

We created this material with them specifically in mind. For most gay porn sites, women are somewhere between 20 and 30 percent of the membership base. Ours is more like 50 or 55 percent thus far...As long as you’re LGBT-affirming and sex-positive, you’re welcome here.

Read the full text of the interview here.

 

Hop Against Homophobia: The Lion at the Door

In honor of the International Day Against Homophobia, I'm paticipating in Hop Against Homophobia. We want to raise awareness of this issue and reward our readers for their participation with prizes!

For this hop, I'll be giving away two free copies of my books, reader's choice of title, plus a grand prize of a free book plus a $25 dollar donation to the Trevor Project in the winner's name. To enter my contest, just leave a comment to this post with your email addy so I can contact you if you win. I'll choose the winners at the end of the day on May 20th, the last day of the hop.

Now I'd like to share with you a story about an experience I had with homophobia when I was a teenager.

My friend Susan and I were the two most unpopular girls in our junior high school. I was short, she was fat, and what was worse, neither of us acted the way girls were supposed to. We both endured a lot of bullying in those days. All kinds of stuff, from getting pushed and hit to kids writing stories about us and reading them aloud as class assignments. What, precisely, possessued us to go on the school ski trip, I cannot recall, but my guess is it was Susan's fault.

Of the two of us, Susan was by far the bravest, and the most unrepentant in her difference. By that time, eighth grade, I would have gladly disappeared into the crowd, except the crowd would not have me. But not Susan. She fought to be herself every single day. 

After the second night of the ski trip, rumors started to circulate that Susan and I were sleeping together. Now, I had realized about two years previously that I was in love with one of my other girlfriends. As unpleasant as school was for me at that time, I knew it would be so much worse if anyone knew I was queer, so I took those feelings and I shoved them down and simply refused to acknowledge them. I figured, if I didn't admit it to myself, no one else would ever know. That's why, when I heard the rumors, I wasn't concerned at all. I really thought my denial protected me.

I found out how wrong I was when a group of about twenty kids stormed our room. They were screaming "Lezzies! Lezzies!" and they tried to break our door down.

I don't know what would have happened if Susan hadn't been there, because where I froze, she sprang into action. She single-handedly held that door shut, while I sat on my suitcase, holding my copy of The Return of the King as if Frodo and Sam would somehow pop from the pages to rescue us.

I remember very clearly watching that door inch open -- all those hands and arms reaching in. Susan was like a lion. She reared back, her long hair flying, and with a burst of power she slammed that door shut. We found out later she broke a girl's finger in the process. She turned to me and yelled, "Help me!" That broke me out of my fog of shock and I got up and helped her hold the door shut. The other kids finally went away.

Afterwards, Susan and I never spoke about that night, and for many years I studiously ignored the more complex aspects of my sexuality. I don't think it's any coincidence that during that time I didn't write. Instead I went to college and earned a degree in a field I didn't like much. Right around the time I started writing fiction I also encountered the word bisexual for the first time. 

About ten years ago, I ran into Susan in the grocery store. She had a daughter. She looked happy. She asked me if I'd ever forgiven our bullies. I said not really. She laughed. "I still hate them too," she said, smiling.

It was nice to see that she hadn't lost her fire. Wherever she is now, I hope she's still going strong.

Incredibly Belated PayPal Update

Okay, so on the off chance you haven't already heard, Paypal changed their acceotable use policy. A couple of highlights:

First and foremost, we are going to focus this policy only on e-books that contain potentially illegal images, not e-books that are limited to just text.

In addition, the policy will be focused on individual books, not on entire “classes” of books. Instead of demanding that e-book publishers remove all books in a category, we will provide notice to the seller of the specific e-books, if any, that we believe violate our policy.  We are working with e-book publishers on a process that will provide any affected site operator or author the opportunity to respond to and challenge a notice that an e-book violates the policy.

In my opinion, this is the best possible outcome we could reasonably expect. And it happened because people spoke up. This is what I love about the internet, for all it's flaws, it provides a public arena in which the powerful can be held accountable for their actions, and nowadays, it's about the only tool we have to keep companies like PayPal in check.

I want to thank everyone who was involved in bringing about this outcome. Don't ever let anyone tell you you can't make a difference. You just did.

Now I'm closing my petition drive contest and I'll be announcing the final winner on that thread shortly.

Will PayPal Reverse It's Censorship Decision?

Just saw this article in TechCrunch:

The last meeting between the EFF and PayPal was on Friday, and its activism director, Rainey Reitman, told TechCrunch that she left with a “good feeling,” with PayPal’s general counsel indicating that they would be “discussing it internally and might even be able to make a public statement in the next week.”

The EFF, she notes, specifically has requested that PayPal “update their policy so that this type of legal fiction would not be affected.”

Not counting them chicken's before they hatch, but it is an encouraging sign.

PayPal Censorship Update: PayPal Speaks, So Does Visa

There have been too many developments in the PayPal Censorship debacle for me to keep up with, especially since we got a new puppy this week and I'm completely distracted by The Cuteness. but here are some highlights. For a more complete picture of what's going on, check out the Banned Writer's blog.

PayPal Director of Communications Anuj Nayar posted a statement on the official PayPal blog regarding the company's decision to pressure ebook retailers into pulling erotica titles which deal with themes of rape, incest, and bestiatility. Like much of this controversy, Nayar's post has me scratching my head. Throughout the post he puts quotation marks around erotica, for reasons which remain a mystery. And he refers to the widespread and ever-growing concern in the internet community as "chatter."  For someone whose job is (presumably) to direct PayPal's communications with the public, I have to wonder how he's earing his salary. Little tip, Mr. Nayar: belittling your customer's concerns tends to inflame their ire.

Nayar raises two reasons for PayPal's decision to enforce the company's acceptable use policy selectively on some legal erotica titles. Both are uninformed and bordering on delusional. First, Nayar says that "this category of eBooks often includes images." Huh? What? Where are you getting your erotica, Mr. Nayar? Are you aware that the vast majority of erotica titles are not illustrated, apart from cover art? Do you know how cost-prohibitive and logistically difficult it would be for indy publishers to produce illustrated ebooks? Does anyone at PayPal know anything at all about the books they are banning?

The second reason Nayar gives is that "This type of content also sometimes intentionally blurs the line between fiction and non-fiction." Hmm. I've been pondering what he might mean by that. Is he referring to titles such as "Daddy You Make My Vagina So Wet," which use the first person point of view? Are the decision makers at PayPal unclear on the use of first-person as a stylistic choice that fiction authors often employ? Do we need to point out that erotica is a subcategory of... drumroll please... FICTION and is listed as such on the sites where it is sold?

There's more, of course, but better you should just read it yourself. I'll just wrap up this section by noting that while Nayar states that "We always welcome your feedback," comments are apparently disabled on the post. It's also interesting to note that Nayar's profile pic is frowny in this post, but smiling in the others. Well, I'm frowning back.

In other news, Banned Authors wrote to Visa asking for clarification on the credit card company's involvement in PayPal's decision to selectively enforce their terms of use policy on some works of legal fiction. We got a timely, concise and courteus response. The gist of it is that Visa is not pressing PayPal to make this move, as PayPal has been saying. So long as the items in question are legal, Visa's policy is not to get involved in issues surrounding the goods people buy through them. Which means that just as many have suspected, PayPal was trying to deflect criticism of thier own decision.

Meanwhile, media attention for this story is growing, the ACLU of California has written an open letter, which you can also sign, here, and the Care2 petition is up to 1900 signatures. Remember if you've signed (and I'm going to expand that to include the ACLU letter and individual letters to PayPal,) leave a comment on the contest post saying so and you'll be entered to win a free ebook. This situation is distressing to say the least, so I feel the least I can do is brighten things up for those who are fighting.

And in that vein, and because I am a besotted new mother, as well as an outraged activist, here is a pic of Ruthie, our new puppy. I like to think she's pondering the appropriate and innappropriate uses of quotation marks.

S.V. Rowle's Pocket Guide to the PayPal Censorship Debacle

Here's a great resource from author S.V. Rowle that compiles a bunch of the posts that have been written about the PayPal censorship issue. Check it out.

Contest: Stop Censorship, Win a Book

Update 6: I have a new post up about PayPal's response to the response to their actions and Visa's stand on the matter. The ACLU of California has an open letter to PayPal that you can sign, and I'm expanding the contest to include that letter and direct letters to PayPal (provided you haven't already won.) So if you haven't yet, speak up, and don't forget to leave a post here when you do. 

Update 5: Our third winner, Vicki, has already read all of my books (I love her), so she's graciously stepping aside and letting one of the others in her group of five win. I'll announce who in the comments in just a moment.

The PayPal Censorship story continues to get wider coverage. It's now been written about on the Independent and on MSNBC's tech blog. You can find links to these stories and more, as well as an open letter to Visa, on the Banned Writers site.

Update 4: We gained some important allies today. The American Bookseller's Foundation for Free Expression (ABFFE) and the National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) wrote a letter to PayPal protesting their policy. Go read it. It will make you cheer.

And if you haven't checked out Banned Writers yet, do so. Lots of good stuff going on in the comments thread there. For example, a call from Eden Connor for guest bloggers and for contributors to an edgy erotica anthology. 

And here's another reason to cheer: we have our fourth winner today! Thank you everyone who has signed the petition, helped spread the word and kept this ball rolling!

Update 3: Wow! I was offline all day today, catching up with work and when I got back I saw a bunch of new comments in the queue. A new winner has been announced and we are well on our way to the next giveaway! You guys are amazing. { }

In other news, I want to direct your attention to this interesting post by Erica Pike, which casts doubt on whether the credit card companies are involved in this at all. It may be all PayPal, in which case, I think we're in better shape, since they are easier to replace with an alternate service.

Got to go back to proofreading now. See you later, babes!

Update 2: Our second winner has been announced! Thank you everyone for speaking up. I <3 you! I have a couple more comments awaiting approval, and if you haven't signed yet, or if you already did and haven't commented here yet, there's still more chances to win. :)

 

Update: Our first winner has been announced! See comments for details. When another five sign the petition and leave a comment here, I'll give away another book. Big hugs to everyone who's participated so far. You are awesome!

Okay, so you know I'm up in arms over this PayPal censorship thing, and I think you should be too. This is a financial institution dictating allowable content in fiction, and it doesn't matter if you read, write, or approve of the content in question, as a reader and a free-thinking person, you don't want to let that happen.

You may have heard that there's a petition. Here it is.

I encourage you to sign it. In fact, I think it is so important for people to speak up on this matter, that I'm going to run a contest for the next week, and maybe longer depending on how things play out. If you sign the petition and leave a comment here stating that you've done so, you will be entered to win a free copy of one of my books, your choice. Every time I get five signatures, I'll do a random selection and one of those five will win. 

Please make your voice heard. This affects all of us. 

PayPal is Watching You

I'm reading a lot of posts today about PayPal and their (so far) mostly successful efforts to censor certain themes in erotica.

You don't need me to tell you that if it's incest, bestiality, and rape today, it will be something else tomorrow, and that if it can happen in erotica then it can happen in erotic romance any second now. This is how it works. The first to be targeted are the most vulnerable. And since incest, rape, and bestiality are all things which, if you're into them you may not want to be identified as being into them, they are easy targets.

So if you haven't yet, please sign the petition voicing your opposition to PayPal, Visa, and Mastercard's policies. And here's a post from J.S. Wayne with some other suggestions for actions you can take, including email addresses for Paypal so you can contact them directly. 

Remittance Girl has a great post here and one of the points she makes, that I'd like to reiterate, is that erotica is written and read predominately by women. So what is really happening here is, once again, the suppression of women's sexual imaginations. When you take into consideration how saturated our culture is with hetero male sexual imaginings, it becomes painfully clear that part of what it means to be a woman in our culture is to be denied your own sexual agency. Our sexuality is only acceptable when mediated by a male viewpoint.

Maybe that's why a book like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which has two rapes in it, is okay, but an indy-published eroticized rape fantasy authored by a woman is a threat to public decency.

What's most maddening of all about this is that everything we are talking about is fiction. You know, NOT REAL. It exists only in our minds. But a lot of people seem to have a really hard time with that distinction. No matter how many studies prove otherwise, they believe that there is a direct correlation between what a person fantasizes about and what they want to have happen in real life.

I've been yelling that this is not so for years. I've pointed it out the many times women came under attack for writing m/m, and I'll point it out again now. Fiction is a funhouse mirror that allows us the distance and safety we need to explore feelings our culture does not permit us to safely experience in other ways. Reading about violence can offer catharsis for intense emotional pain. A rape fantasy can be about being absolved of responsibility for having sex. Those elements and any others function for different readers in different ways and that is just one of the reasons why freedom of expression is vital for a thriving literature. 

The deep irony of all of this is that in claiming to "protect" us from obscenity, what censorship really does is deny us the safest outlet for exploration we could have.

I'm grateful that my publisher, Loose Id, has had the foresight not to do business through PayPal. I do have three of my freebie ficlets up on Smashwords, and one of them is The Cats Will Play, a Stan and Gus story wherein Billy Pipps engages in some interspecies bondage sex play. I'm pretty sure that getting tied up and having his dick licked by cats with psychic mind-control powers is not what Coker or the authors of the Paypal policy have in mind when they say bestiality, but it is sex with animals, and they're not shape shifters so there's no ducking out that way. I guess the only place it will be available now is right here.

Trafficking Blog with Belinda McBride

Author Belinda McBride has a moving post on her blog about her friend who was trafficked, and she graciously invited me to talk about Polaris Project, which is working hard to fight this frighteningly prevalent crime. Please read both posts. Commenters to my post will be entered to win a free copy of Broken.

Do they have to be gay?

Six years ago an editor asked me to make my gay characters straight, and an agent refused to market the book after I refused. It was the most pivotal development of my career with perhaps the exception of my first novel contract. It's the reason Jessica Freely exists, and as much as I love what I'm doing now (and I do) it still hurts.

And it's still happening.

Rachel Manija Brown and Sherwood Smith received a similar request from an agent and are talking about it on Publisher's Weekly.

Maybe this is what progress looks like. What happened in silence six years ago is now an internet uproar.

Roar away I say. Roar away.

NPR on the future of bookstores

Here's an interesting article</a> offering an optimistic view of the evolving role of independent book stores.

http://t.co/xBKRzQm

Coming Out Day Links

Shame on me for not including any links in yesterday's post. I've added some, but here they are again anyway:

The Trevor Project

A hotline for lgbtq and questioning youth: 866-488-7386. See what Amy Lane is doing to support this project and enter Aurora Alexander's contest while you're at it.

It Get's Better

Dan Savage's video project letting young people know that there is a life after bullying: an awesome one.

Happy Coming Out Day!

To everyone everywhere who's out or in or in between. The diversity of human expression in sexuality, art, and love is something to be embraced and celebrated.

There's been a lot of bad news lately, and sometimes it seems like the forces that would silence/erase/kill us are arrayed in ever greater numbers, emboldened by a reactionary political climate of fear. But the trend of history is toward more freedom for more people. Women couldn't vote until 1920, slavery was an institution in this country less than 150 years ago, and Stonewall happened just 41 years ago.

When I got my first crush on a girl, in fifth grade, I had never even heard the word lesbian. I didn't hear the word bisexual until I was in my twenties. Two years ago, I discovered the idea of gender-queer. Some of us have been out a long, long time, and some of us are still discovering ourselves. But whoever we are and wherever we are on our journey, we won't go away, and we won't give up.

Time is on our side. And it gets better. And we're not alone.

Today, celebrate yourself and those you love.

FCC Seeks Further Feedback

Here's an article in the NYT about the FCC, Google, Verizon, and net neutrality. I kind of find it comforting to see that the FCC is as confused as I am.

Natural Allies

Here's Brett Hartinger with a more positive spin on the impact of women who love men who love men: AfterElton: Has Slash Made the World Better for Gay Men?