This newest title in the Lambda award-winning series from Cleis Press offers more strong, engaging writing for a wide assortment of erotic flavors. Butches, femmes, bois, daddies, mistresses, slaves, tops and bottoms, bikers, truckers, librarians, bosses, and park rangers move through the pages. While they are eventually wearing nothing, they begin stories with vinyl Edwardian formal clothes, spike heels, tight business suits, scarves with cat pins hiding leather studded collars, tight jeans, tight pants, tight tops, tight bras, tight – well you get the picture.

Editor Tristan Taormino, who is retiring from this series with this edition, worked with lesbian writer Joan Larkin to select these stories, intentionally including a cross-section of lesbian sexualities. Many of the plots will be familiar to lesbian erotica readers: boss and secretary, quick public sex, bar pick ups, mythically great random sexual encounters, a few 3-ways, some butch/femme switching, and several first-person stories narrated by the bottoms of S/M couples into humiliation and control scenes. There were also some new plot ideas: boi/boi public sex in Golden Gate park, a WWII military dyke/reporter affair, a biker and trucker enjoying the possibilities of a semi sleeper cab, and an extended episode featuring an enema bag.

My personal favorite in the collection for both the inventiveness and the quality of the writing, is “The Virgin of G,” the story of a dyke in whose cunt the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe appears, something her wise grandmother is utterly unsurprised by. I also loved the writing in “Blade, Ink, Steel,” even though the erotic practices in the story aren’t my own nor usually erotic to me. As Joan Larkin (who edited the first-ever Lesbian Poetry and Lesbian Fiction anthologies in the mid-1970’s), writes in her intro: “the better written the story, the more erotically powerful it is. Writing itself is an erotic art, ruled by rhythms of desire and release.” These rhythms can carry us into a place of enjoying stories about experiences we might not have nor want to have (although we might and might, too!), and create tension and heat that are very real.

And very enjoyable, for the most part. Some stories are, for me, pure fun fantasy, such as Radclyffe’s “Dream Date,” set on a lesbian cruise and featuring one very dreamy butch, or DyLynn DeSaint’s “Waiting,” about various escapades at a librarians’ conference. Other stories didn’t work as erotica for me; I don’t like S/M stories where the top is an emotionally distant sadist who gets off on actually harming or humiliating the bottom, where there isn’t an exchange of lust and power but instead only one-way dominance. This collection has two of these, but the whole point of creating an anthology is to represent many different voices, so readers have plenty of choices.

I was really aware of the overwhelming prevalence of stories with strap-ons, a few where these were called dildos and treated just as sex toys, but many more where they were called “cocks” and were very much part of gender role play. Now I am a fan of strapping on myself, but it was a little odd to me that so much of the oral sex in the anthology was women giving blow jobs to their partner’s cocks. I missed reading more scenes of good old-fashioned get-that-tongue-in-some labia oral sex, in part because the ability to write really good descriptions of giving or receiving oral sex is one important strength of any writer of erotica. There is still so much cultural ignorance about women’s bodies, including a great lack of names for our external sexual bits, that describing us in ways that are clear, accurate, and hot as hell takes real talent. I did find plenty of places where writers used “vagina” when they mean “vulva,” which is a personal pet peeve of mine (vagina on the inside, vulva on the outside. Got it?). And four different stories described women as being impaled on a cock, which I also found interesting, and after several repetitions, kinda spooky.

But if you’re less interested in linguistic patterns of lesbian writing, and more interested in the important basics then, yes, plenty of these stories will get you all hot and bothered. Yes, you probably will find you need to pause between stories for some pleasant release of tension. Yes, it makes great bed reading, although maybe not bedtime, at least not if you want to actually fall asleep.