Susie Bright’s 2011 memoir Big Sex, Little Death is an essential account of the various struggles of the 1970s.
“Revolutionaries don’t look good on actuarial tables,” says Santa Cruz’s Susie Bright, but her own survival is a tribute to her strength, eclecticism and honesty. Maybe a revolutionary defies the insurance companies’ odds if she has enough of a sense of humor.
Bright and writer and columnist Rachel Bussel are reading from the book they worked on, Best Sex Writing 2012, next Thursday, April 12, at Bookshop Santa Cruz. Here are nearly two dozen essays from contributors. Bright’s “Why Lying about Monogamy Matters” is one of them. The book digests reports on the Slut Walk protest, on sex in old age (if you count 66 as an old age) and the problems of selling sex or buying it. Here is an essay on sex in the Navy in the pre-don’t ask, don’t tell days, an essay on guys who like fat chicks and a chronicle on what was lost when the NYC’s meat-packing district got gentrified. And writer Greta Christina proposes that “atheists do it better.” This-here atheist does the best he can. But will the cry of “Oh, nothing! Oh, my nothing!” replace the more common horizontal shout-out to God? (On this topic Bright notes, “I’m a recovering Irish Catholic-turned-atheist who will always relish taking the Lord’s name in vain in moments of rage and passion. Call me quaint. What I don’t miss is believing I’m going to burn in hell for any of it.”)
Bright describes her collaborator on Best Sex Writing 2012 thusly: “Rachel is a beloved feminist sex writer and editor, who’s nearly singlehandedly responsible for the Internet cupcake craze. Yes, really. I became friends with Rachel years ago because we shared a mutual fascination with the young Monica Lewinsky. It necessitated further discussion.”
Bright and writer and columnist Rachel Bussel are reading from the book they worked on, Best Sex Writing 2012, next Thursday, April 12, at Bookshop Santa Cruz. Here are nearly two dozen essays from contributors. Bright’s “Why Lying about Monogamy Matters” is one of them. The book digests reports on the Slut Walk protest, on sex in old age (if you count 66 as an old age) and the problems of selling sex or buying it. Here is an essay on sex in the Navy in the pre-don’t ask, don’t tell days, an essay on guys who like fat chicks and a chronicle on what was lost when the NYC’s meat-packing district got gentrified. And writer Greta Christina proposes that “atheists do it better.” This-here atheist does the best he can. But will the cry of “Oh, nothing! Oh, my nothing!” replace the more common horizontal shout-out to God? (On this topic Bright notes, “I’m a recovering Irish Catholic-turned-atheist who will always relish taking the Lord’s name in vain in moments of rage and passion. Call me quaint. What I don’t miss is believing I’m going to burn in hell for any of it.”)
Bright describes her collaborator on Best Sex Writing 2012 thusly: “Rachel is a beloved feminist sex writer and editor, who’s nearly singlehandedly responsible for the Internet cupcake craze. Yes, really. I became friends with Rachel years ago because we shared a mutual fascination with the young Monica Lewinsky. It necessitated further discussion.”
Bright’s 2011 memoir Big Sex, Little Death was a book to put next to Carolyn See’s Dreaming and Phoebe Gloeckner’s Diary of a Teenage Girl: essential accounts of the 1970s. Bright’s book reminds us that sexual liberation was part of the other movements against international war and racism. Big Sex, Little Death isn’t non-stop concupiscence. Rather, it’s the memoir of an ardent revolutionary in all fields, trying to redeem what people had been cheated out of in their lives—including their sex lives.
Bright made all the right enemies, from Andrea Dworkin to the KKK. When she was organizing for unions in Kentucky, the Klan broke into her apartment in Louisville, leaving a threatening sign: “Niger-Loving Communist Cunt!”
And Bright’s memoir Big Sex, Little Death has the algebra of the stuff that shortens revolutionary lives: excoriation, public drama and inevitably, the social reaction itself, that dismal crippled turkey trot of social progress: one step forward, two steps back.
As the rise of the lovely and talented Rick Santorum shows, the puritans never really go away. Says Bright, “The GOP’s slut-baiting strategy is the last resort of losers—not to mention scoundrels. Unfortunately, the religious crusaders the GOP employed for this election fodder are not Astroturf.” (Which is to say they’re not created from the top down, as was the Tea Party movement.) “Cynical Limbaugh and Fox News may have emboldened them, but the fundamentalists honestly don’t give a hang about any of these candidates. They are on a crusade.”
Bright got sustenance in her last year on the road touring with her memoir.
“It was like being Woody Guthrie with a clit,” Bright said. “Detroit, East St. Louis, Atlanta, Baltimore, the Mexican and Canadian border territories. I did not have to articulate ‘class warfare’ to anyone. I was greeted with open arms by the walking wounded who, to their credit, would still rather ball than kill.”
Revolutionary Road
I’m probably not the right person to write about Bright because I know her milieu all too keenly. I didn’t know her personally, but we had a mutual friend or two back in high school. For that matter, the first girl I slept with was from her school, University High. In her memoir, Bright mentions visiting the NuArt Theater and Papa Bach’s Bookstore, two local suicide-prevention centers well known to the young and depressed.
We worked at different West L.A. McDonalds, separated by a only a few miles, learning the values that would form our deep and ardent respect for the corporate world. Separately, we rode home on the Blue Bus of Santa Monica Transit immortalized by Jim Morrison, stinking of French fry tallow. In our separate domiciles, we thrilled to see George Putnam on KTLA, shaking his silvering locks in anti-communist wrath.
But the bird-dogging simile I’ve created will no longer hunt. Me, I just watched Putnam foam like a burst seltzer bottle. Bright actually got attention from the Sage of Chino by putting an informational cross section of lady parts in the underground newspaper The Red Tide. It was exactly the kind of thing Putnam had warned against in his documentary Perversion for Profit: evil men with sticky hands pleasuring themselves as they gloated over a diagram of ovaries.
“I have here before me a picture of the most disgusting thing I have ever seen,” Putnam trumpeted to shivering Orange County listeners.
Shortly afterward, Bright got out of the place Robert Crumb deemed The Hateful Megalopolis. Farewell to a city that, in those days, was all about the celestial thrill of bumping into some douche from a sitcom at the Market Basket. As Bright’s father told her, when it came to progressives, “People went to San Francisco or died trying.”
San Francisco in the ’70s and ’80s had its own problems: mainly the tendency of women’s groups to “cannibalize” each other. Bright was at one time the only employee at the feminist sex shop Good Vibrations. She was brought in as ad manager to the nascent On Our Backs, where she began the column “Susie Sexpert’s Lesbian Sex World.” Bright was present at the creation of something now seen everywhere. Imagine living in a world in which women didn’t make their own pornography. Is that a world you’d want to live in? (He said, in what he hoped was an approximation of Putnam’s own stern voice of doom.)
Take it from a former supporter of Santa Cruz’s own Praying Mantis Women’s Brigade (don’t ask): it’s hard for denizens of 2012 to remember 30 scant years ago of the political worries between women over what women did in bed with other women. “The entire lesbian establishment hated our guts,” Bright wrote once. After her painful break with On Our Backs, she nested in Santa Cruz to raise her daughter with her lover Jon, and this is where she’s lived since 1994. “I’m dug in,” she notes. Bright is still writing, still editing, still rebelling and trying to bring hope to the fearful.
Bright was seen in the 1995 documentary about homosexuality and lesbians in film The Celluloid Closet. She described her frustration with Fried Green Tomatoes: the women in it becoming ever so close, but not becoming lovers. “It was like being powdered with fleas,” Bright said. I get the same reaction in the swoon of full purple bromance in the Apatow comedies—Damon and Pythias, but no homo, bro.
Bright was the adviser who put the estrogen into the Jennifer Tilly/Gina Gershon film Bound in 1996; compare that full-on fuck to the dark hint of lesbian affair in Basic Instinct, the very noting of which makes Michael Douglas call Stone “butch” in disgust. You’d think a San Franciscan would have recognized a femme when he saw one.
Bright laments the sexlessness of mainstream movies: “Teenage movies used to be about balling, getting high and driving fast. The Hunger Games are about hunting down your fellow teen and killing him. Chastely, of course.”
But there are signs of progress. On her Canadian trip, Bright got good news. The Ontario parliament took the unthinkable step of legalizing prostitution. Please recall that “Toronto the Good” was a town where they used to close curtains on the department stores to discourage Sabbath-day window shopping.
Said Bright, “It’s a standoff between the moralistic hand-wringing crowd versus those congratulating themselves for being so cool. But underneath the titillating headlines, this sex work decision is the most important North American labor ruling in decades since the PATCO affair—only this time with a happy ending!”
SUSIE BRIGHT & RACHEL KRAMER BUSSEL read from Best Sex Writing 2012
Thursday, April 12, 7:30pm
Bookshop Santa Cruz
Free
