Bottoms Up: Writing About Sex

Bottoms Up: Writing About Sex is a collection of writing about desire. The stories are not straight up sexual narrations, but pieces, poems and stories that examine the concept and manifestation of desire itself. Rather than describing the physical acts of sex, the book examines the impetus, experiences, thoughts and feelings that drive desire. Contributors include Eileen Myles, Michelle Tea, Red Jordan Arobateau, Lori Selke, Victoria Brownworth, Robert Gluck and Patrick Califia.

The stories in the collection are varied: an examination of iconoclastic sexuality(musing on what it would be like to both fuck James Dean and fuck like James Dean), the zenith of desire residing in the sweat-darkened leather pants of Lenny Kaye after a Patti Smith Group show, genderqueer cruising, the connection between sex and loss.

The book is not explicitly “gay”, but it is explicitly queer. The stories often break down normal conceptions of gender, eliminating categories such as homo- and heterosexual.