A while ago*, a tweet from Roger Ebert caught my eye:
When I clicked through it took me to Susie Bright’s blog — and that name alone, even before I read the article, made me smile. Fair warning, this post will be as close to PG as I can manage but it may still contain things you “don’t wanna think about” — especially if you are reading this at work. Also, I wouldn’t recommend clicking the links at work or in front of young kids!
The first time I remember Susie Bright’s name was when I found, in our library stacks, Susie Sexpert’s Lesbian Sex World
Others’ stashes of porn and erotica would be discovered in high school and later — including a selection of Penthouse Forum issues, the publication which is the very focus of Bright’s blog post. In hindsight, it’s entirely likely that I read her film reviews while I was in my teens.
In reading the rest of her post, I realize I followed in her footsteps in other ways — one of the things I did in the early 90s was to moderate the adults-only section of a local BBS which included reviewing adult movies (this was still the era of VHS and lemme tell you, most of those videos were not worth the rental price) — and when I traveled to San Francisco on my own in 1995, one of the places I sought out was the rather legendary Good Vibrations store (and its museum), even though by then it was no longer nearly so radical a concept. I had no idea then that Bright had worked there just over a decade earlier.
More recently, I grabbed a copy of her memoirs, Big Sex, Little Death via the Kindle store and it was hard to put down. Bright writes well and while the book doesn’t tell the whole story of her life (obviously — she’s still living!) it does give the bookends of her childhood and the first years of her motherhood. In between she writes about her time with two very radical publications: Red Tide (yes, that’s a socialist reference) and On Our Backs (the magazine that broke barriers of porn by, for, and about women). If I recall, it was one of the titles at the heart of the Little Sisters’ Bookstore vs. Canada Customs case. I gave her book 5 stars — it’s hard to wrest that high a rating from me but Big Sex, Little Death is riveting and bittersweet and ultimately just a damned good read.
Bright is a radical in every sense. I appreciate what she has done and continues to do in the world of sex-education; and I am happy that she continues to write. Without Bright, Madonna could neither have made nor marketed Sex and I’m confident that the world of lesbian erotica would be much further behind. Bright, whether through naivety or stubbornness or dumb luck, broke ground and made a lot of enemies; she claimed women’s bodies as sexual objects even as most feminists were rebelling against the objectification of women (the debate gets pretty complicated and messy and Big Sex, Little Death only skims the surface). Bright never flinched and never looked back. She still faces protests and conflict but continues to stand her ground.
Whether you consider her blunt, crude, or just straightforward, she pulls no punches when it comes to discussing women and our bodies. Her latest publication is Mother/Daughter Sex Advice written with her daughter, Aretha (reviews note that mother and daughter do not always agree, which is a relief). I’m sure it’s a fabulous read and every bit as eye-opening as everything else Bright has touched.
*This post has been sitting in my draft folder since last October… but I thought I would let it out to the world after another pass and with the updated review of her memoirs.