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Why They Won't Keep It In The Bedroom |
NEW!
P-form #39, "Performance & the Pornographic," now a downloadable PDF file.
Reviews: GoodReads: "Strategic Sex is awesome."; Betty Noir: "Best Nonfiction of 2008. Possibly one of the best sexually-themed anthologies I've ever read, and I've read many."
In the early '90s, when I was getting my BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, I worked as Managing Editor for an international performance art quarterly called P-form, published by Randolph Street Gallery. Eventually I moved to Portland, OR, but in 1996 returned to P-form as a guest editor for an issue on "Performance and the Pornographic," which looked at performance art with sexual content. The issue included written or visual contributors Scott O'Hara, Carol Queen, R. R. Katz, Sarah Whitely, Jennifer Natalya Fink, Wickie Stamps, Glenn Ligon, Marti Hohmann/Annie Sprinkle, 848 Community Space, Blair Wilson, and Tina LaPorta. The issue was (predictably) a hot seller. The Utne Reader called it "filled with intelligent writing about the social role of performers who explore the outer limits of sexuality."
That project eventually became Strategic Sex, which looks at why people bring private information or experiences into public view. The book features writers, artists, and activists exploring through fiction, nonfiction, and performance texts why sex (or representations of sex) are created or disseminated in public. The publisher is Harrington Park Press, who also publish Steven Zeeland, Eric Rofes, Samuel Steward, and contributors to my book Scott O'Hara and Michael Scarce.
StratSex has boys, girls, queers, straights, happy stories and sad stories, fiction and nonfiction, and consequently is a little hard to classify and market. My editorial approach from P-form through this book and other, unpublished projects, is greatly informed by visual arts curating and my education at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In visual arts curating, the point is more about making thought-provoking contrasts and juxtapositions, not policing uniformity of style, content, or subject matter. Consequently, it's hard to know where in a bookstore StratSex should be shelved, but it would've made perfect sense as a gallery exhibition.
From my introduction:
Strategic Sex asks an unusually clear and direct question about sex: Why? Sex is traditionally thought of as unconscious and instinctual, a blind force from ones nether regions of id and libido. The contributors to this book are not operating blindly; they think hard about sex: before, during, and after. Yet their analyses do not throw a wet blanket of sociological constructs or psychoanalytical mindfuck onto the party. They strive to keep sex's power intact. They want to examine this vital force, to learn its potential and effects. As eighteenth-century inventors saw the power of the steam engine in a teakettle's rattling lid, these writers see powerful energy sources in the boiling forces of sex. Here they recall, relate, dream and imagine ways of harnessing that energy, putting it to work. Theirs is sex with a purpose, sex with direction: strategic sex....This is not another warm-fuzzy erotica collection, academic jargonfest or uptight porn debate. Nor is it starry-eyed Sex Positive cheerleading. Like sex itself, this book is thrilling and depressing, dark and transcendent, paradoxical and contradictory. It is fiction and nonfiction, queer and straight. Boundaries are blurred and definitions are messy — again, like sex itself. Strategic Sex is a book about questioning, thinking, and exploring. It is not about definitive answers or pronouncements. Rather than resolve, it hopes to deepen the mystery of sexual energy and, in so doing, inspire more exploration, thought and discussion. And more sex.
"Strategic Sex doesn't offer writing about sex so much as it show us writing as sex -- a seductive, presumptuous, and erotic come-on to the brain and other organs. Imagine a long summer of surprising encounters, of sudden sex in public places, with every imaginable complication. As thrilling as gossip, as sexy as good porn, and far smarter than the average bear, this collection proves that D. Travers Scott is as talented and astute an editor as he is a writer." Matthew Stadler, Allan Stein
"Smart, sexy, and full of surprises, D. Travers Scott's Strategic Sex is wilder than a roomful of drunken sailors. These often startling and always provocative essays explode popular assumptions about the imagined boundaries between gay and straight, male and female, and -- most important -- private and public. Sex is never 'just sex.' In expanding our awareness of why sex can never be reliably consigned to one or another neat little square, Strategic Sex is key reading for everyone, and exceptionally entertaining reading at that." Steve Zeeland, The Queen is Dead
"From the gym and the rock club to the university and perhaps nirvana, these writers canvass the American scene, constantly surprising the artful wit of their investigations. The topic of sexuality is used to explore and explode the many barriers marring contemporary discourse -- not only those between classes, races, and genders, but between the mind and the body as well. Rarely has a book made for such good reading either with both halves of your brain or with just one hand. This is sexual play as it should be: edgy, committed, and vibrant. At a time when we are asked to believe that the Sexual Revolution has ended in defeat, Strategic Sex reminds us that we have not yet begun to understand the myriad ways our lives have been transformed." Nayland Blake, artist, curator, and writer
"In the past decade, anthologies of personal essays about sex -- particularly transgressive sex -- have become increasingly commonplace; as a result, they have largely lost their potency and shock value. Scott, a novelist (Execution, Texas: 1987) and performance artist, has collected 20 such essays that range from the mundane to the extraordinary and that, as a whole, carry some power. Stating that his volume is 'about questioning, thinking and exploring' as well as 'deepen[ing] the meaning of sexual energy,' he focuses on unusual and public sexual activities ... [to] deliver the intellectual and erotic goods. The best work here often deals with more than just sexual activity. Jayson Marston's 'White Skinhead Seeks Black Submissives' looks at race, sex and violence in ways that are unsettling; though it feels half-formed, it's startling and extremely provocative. In 'Under my Skin,' noted performance artist Ron Athey relates a simple history of the tattoos that cover almost his entire body, gracefully evoking the drastic emotional and psychological changes he has undergone." Publishers Weekly