by William Dean
(12/17/03)
Thomas S. Roche's more than 200 published short stories have appeared in a wide variety of Web sites, magazines, and anthologies including Susie Bright's Best American Erotica series and Maxim Jakubowski's Mammoth Book of Erotica and Best New Erotica series. The editor of the Noirotica series of erotic crime-noir anthologies, Roche is also a sex educator and the Marketing Manager at San Francisco's Good Vibrations. His erotica perspective can be dark, edgy, and decidedly fun.
CS: You're such an all-around guy, with many inlets into what you do. For example, as Marketing person for Good Vibrations, you were quoted in a newspaper business section about the increase in products from GV shipped to troops after the invasion of Iraq. Has that continued through the occupation period? And what do you think it says about erotica/sexuality in general in relation to the "official" policy of neo-conservatives and censorship of porn?
THOMAS ROCHE (TR): Well, I think it's clear that after ten years of the explosive growth of Internet (with its online dating and easy access to free porn) and the equally explosive growth of the adult video industry -- up to 11-12,000 titles published per year -- people want their porn. Even, or especially, when they're in a combat zone, men and women are both interested in sexually explicit material. Whatever the conservatives might try to do to stem the tide of erotica, the U.S. is coming around to a place where erotic material is considered a right, or maybe a privilege of being American.
We've definitely continued to see a large number of shipments to military addresses, and there was no negative fallout from that article that I'm aware of. I think that even though some people are strongly opposed to any variety in sexual expression, no matter how many people think sexual entertainment is wrong and immoral, the majority of Americans just go ahead and do what they want.
CS: You seem to do a fair amount of public readings of your erotica. What was that like the first time? And how has your attitude changed about performing "dirty works" in public?
TR: The first time I performed erotica in public, the response was so overwhelming that it really inspired me to want to do more. People just looooooooved that story. It was "Death Rock," which later appeared in Black Sheets magazine and a book called Ritual Sex edited by Tristan Taormino and David Aaron Clark. I think it was just so weird and Goth that people in the perv community had never heard anything like it, which was incredibly gratifying and very surprising to me.
I had been going to open poetry readings since I was about 17, when I would drive down from Sacramento to a place called Cafe Babar at 22nd and Guerrerro in San Francisco. There, the crowd was very much hipper-than-hip and not enormously encouraging, and the work I was writing was less sexual and not nearly as skillfully written. I heard people like Danielle Willis and Kathleen Wood read, both of whom were early purveyors of the "sex work confession" style of writing that would get big in the early 1990s. I was totally blown away by them and by some of the other readers who were coming right out of the Beat tradition that turned poetry on its ear. So I saw a lot of performers who did weird-ass stuff with rhythm and content and performance allied to poetry, and it really opened my mind at the same time that it made me feel very intimidated. So it was very nice, five or six years later, to actually become one of those performers who people perceived as being radical or inventive.
The second time I read in public was actually a really terrifying experience. I was just getting really involved in the SM community in San Francisco, and Bill Brent of Black Books organized the first "Perverts Put Out" reading. I thought ten or twenty people would show up, and I sat there on the edge of the stage and just watched fifty, sixty, seventy people file in and got completely panicked. They were these hardcore leathermen, decked-out femme doms, butch dykes, glamorous trannies -- I was totally overwhelmed, excited but feeling like I was so out of my league. But it was the most receptive and supportive group of people I've ever read for, and that really inspired me to do more of it.
The worst experience I've ever had, which I still haven't completely recovered from, was reading at the Valentine's Day Berkeley Poetry Slam in an Irish bar in Oakland, where I headlined with Carol Queen, who read her poetry from her granola lesbian days in Oregon and got a GREAT reception. Then I stepped up and read "The Last Words of Charlie Ballerina," which I've read to many crowds that loved it. I didn't realize until I was up there reading it that the entire story is making fun of art students, and that the bar was packed with these pretentious poetry types from UC Berkeley. They were not amused. The story also makes fun of perverts and drag queens and trannies and dykes, all of whom never got offended and seemed to laugh their asses off when I read it for them, but this crowd apparently didn't get it. It is the only time I've actually been heckled. On stage, I mean (I get heckled on the street all the time). I cut the story short and have avoided reading at poetry slams ever since, even though some of my very favorite local writers read at poetry slams -- Thea Hillman, Daphne Gottlieb, Clint Catalyst, Tarin Towers. But as a writer and as a performer, you've got to know your limitations, and I think that's one of mine, so I avoid them from now on.
CS: One of the trends newspaper and trade reporters are suddenly noticing is that porn is becoming more mainstream. As it becomes even more commercialized and consequently watered down, how important is it for erotica writers like yourself to keep the edges sharp and the explorations sophisticated and deep?
TR: I definitely think porn is becoming acceptable and attractive to a much larger number of people. I have a hard time finding the sharp edges of it, but I think one thing that's great about more people exploring it is that my most vanilla fantasies can finally be perceived as being really unusual and out there!
At Good Vibrations, our very best-selling erotica books are the more vanilla ones that appeal to straight couples, like the Naughty Stories series by Alison Tyler or -- our all-time amazingly-popular best-sellers that completely blow the covers off our other titles in terms of sales -- Cleis Press's Sweet Life books edited by Violet Blue. I think more and more straight couples are keeping the "spice" in their relationships by sharing their taboo fantasies and enjoying them together.
Ironically enough, in recent years I've moved more toward the mainstream rather than out to the fringe as erotica has gotten more accepted. My books His and Hers, which I cowrote with Alison Tyler, were designed to be charming, cuddly couples' erotica, even though many of the fantasies there are very naughty. They're all love stories in some sense, which is what was important to me when I was writing them. They're not the edgy, dangerous, violent stuff with dead people and knives and guns that I was writing early on. So in a way, porn getting more accepted has made me less edgy as a writer. I've also shied away from horror recently, just because I felt like that phase of my writing was less exciting to me. I recently started writing some edgier material that verges on horror, like "The House of Poison" and "Spider Bites." And I do think the "couples" erotica market, even though it's ultimately about positive, supportive relationships, really does include some exceedingly taboo stuff -- rape fantasies, anonymous sex, humiliation. I love that I can write stories with some of that kind of content and have it be presented as something that straight, mainstream couples can enjoy together.
CS: You've said in interviews elsewhere that -- like Poppy Z. Brite -- you're moving somewhat away from the darker and horror aspects of erotica writing. What's prompted that? And what new areas of erotica are you really interested in exploring and writing about?
TR: I love writing short story erotica but I think I've burned myself out writing so many of them -- over 100 in 2002 and about 80 so far in 2003, under various pseudonyms. It's hard to write truly edgy stuff when I'm turning out that number of stories. More recently I've slowed down and started writing darker stuff, partially because I'm interested in working in longer forms -- novels and screenplays -- and I think I'm gearing up to explore some horror and noir themes again, whether in screenplay, comic book, or novel form I don't really know yet. I think I'm waiting for an idea to hit me that I hope can explore darker sexuality in the way something like Secretary did or, for films from a few years ago, the German film The Night Porter or Atom Egoyan's Exotica.
CS: You also said that one of my favorite old SF/Fantasy authors Roger Zelazny is one of your favs and influences. What kind of freedom -- as a writer -- does the mixing of myth, history, science-fiction, and fantasy situations and characters give you? And just how outrageous do the cross-genre possibilities seem? A unicorn who's into leather? Hercules and Anubis cruising for a threesome match up? A dominatrix Harpy?
TR: Well, when Cecilia Tan started publishing her Circlet Press books, it was really the first explicit melding of these two subcultures, pervs and geeks, that had this incredible crossover growing for 20 years. I think every pervy science fiction reader has had a fantasy or two about magic and sci-fi elements -- I know my first erotic novel, written when I was 12-15, was all about SM and magic. It was about a male warrior cursed by his arch enemy, a wizard, and turned into a woman and forced to become his enemy's female slave. A submissive cross-dresser's wet dream. She eventually became this bad-ass Buffy type warrior-bitch and put the hurt on her enemies somethin' fierce, and part of the way she did it was by sucking off all these bad-ass warriors so they'd teach her to use magic. Along the way she got fucked by a centaur, an ancient mummy prince, a sea serpent, that sort of thing. It was so blatantly pervy it disturbs me to remember it, especially since I was 12 when I started writing it.
So I guess that's an example of a really simplistic melding of science fiction-fantasy and erotica. But the way I really like to bring the two elements together are through more subtle mythic structures, like my story "Black Lily" which is a take-off on the third part of Paul Bowles' The Sheltering Sky, where an American woman is lost in the desert and is taken into the harem of a nomadic tribesman. I just took the very basic concept, but the fantasy element was that his wives hate her so he gives her a drug that turns her into a man and frees her from her previous life, and even makes her forget English. So...I like to think stories like that do what the best speculative fiction does, and reflect the possibilities of myth as it relates to sexuality, rather than just using the tropes of fantasy for erotic charge.
Don't get me wrong; monster-fucking ROCKS. But I also think that sexuality is magic, and melding the two in fiction can evoke a lot of the power that the most intense erotic experiences evoke in real life.
Plus, and I just have one more thing to say about fantasy vs. erotica -- all erotica is fantasy. I don't know about you, but when I close my eyes and enjoy a simple jerk-off fantasy, anything goes. I am absolutely not bound by the strictures of reality, so it just seems like a natural echo of the process of sexual fantasy to throw in outlandish otherworldly elements.
CS: Without getting embarrassingly revealing, how important are your own personal fantasies to what you write? Autobiographical or more as an observer of others?
TR: Most of my writing isn't autobiographical, but I have an increasing tendency to draw from my own life. Still, I do more drawing things I make up about certain "types" of people, rather than things that really happen to me.
I sometimes feel weird writing lesbian erotica, but I have known so many incredibly cool dykes and seen so much of their hot, weird, and dramatic sexual interactions as an observer, that I couldn't not write about it! And there definitely is an element of wish-fulfillment and even envy in there -- I wouldn't mind being a bad-ass dyke in leather pants and big boots, or for that matter a baby doll dress with a strap-on.
There's another element to wish-fulfillment in erotica, though, and it's much simpler -- and I think it's much more what I've been doing in recent years. I have recently been writing stories about hot interactions with the kind of people I actually want to fuck -- me, personally, rather than writing about an interaction between two fictional characters. That was kind of a big step for me, and I started to do it a lot more when I was putting together my stories for His and Hers, which are all pretty close to what I actually fantasize about doing in the real world.
I've also been very involved in the SM community, and part of the reason I spend so much time writing erotica is that the heat of SM is often watered down by the need to be safe, sane, and consensual. In my fantasies I can turn a scene of someone being attacked by spiders into a power fantasy, whereas that's just never going to happen in real life.
CS: To those of us who live elsewhere, the idea of San Francisco during the holidays makes us think of mistletoe orgies, leathered Santas cavorting with pretty elves, and other naughty reindeer games. What's Christmas really like on the old Barbary Coast?
TR: Oh, boy. I just was talking to someone from New Orleans, which I have all these decadent fantasies about. I mentioned casually that this friend of mine and her boyfriend went to a strip club with this girl they're seeing, and my friend was like "Wait. They're seeing her together? All three of them went to a strip club together?" "Yeah," I said. "It's San Francisco. People do that here."
In reality, though, the holidays are this really stressful time for most of us, the way it probably is for everyone everywhere. Carol Queen always gives a big Queen of Heaven party, which is her sex party she organizes, for New Year's Eve. That's a nice way to, er, blow off steam once the stress of the holidays starts to ease off.
CS: Erotically-speaking or sexually, what's the most -- umm -- stimulating thing that's ever happened to you over the holidays?
TR: Definitely doing Christmas Sucks events. In general, I shut down sexually over the holidays and I get a little stressed out. Christmas Sucks brings me out of that.
The holidays in and of themselves aren't that sexy a time, which is part of the inspiration behind stories like "A Very Naughty Elf," or "Make It Real, Santa" (on goodvibes.com in the Good Vibes Magazine) to try to wrest some hint of sexual charge from the images of the holidays.
Winter, on the other hand, is incredibly sexy. I've lived in San Francisco for 12 years now, and SF has even less seasonal weather than Sacramento, where I grew up. So I guess it's only natural that I totally fetishize winter clothes, ski lodges and hot chocolate. I get shit for this from my friends, but for some reason I think nothing is sexier than a woman bundled up for snowboarding. I think it's that form-fitting silk long underwear I know's underneath. Okay, that's just given an idea for a new anthology.
CS: I know you have some novels brewing and doubtless many more stories ready for publication. What are we likely to see coming soon from Thomas Roche?
TR: Well, I wrote several mainstream crime novels that didn't actually manage to get published, for various irritating reasons. I love writing crime, but the next book I'm planning to work on will be much more explicitly sexual, in the Noirotica realm.
Speaking of Noirotica, unfortunately the series, which was being published by Black Books, is a casualty of that company going out of business. I've just launched Noirotica.net so I can publish some of the fantastic work I bought to be in Noirotica 4, which was completed years ago but never published. I've got excellent work by Rain Graves, Nancy Kilpatrick, M. Christian, Lauren Rhoads of Morbid Curiosity, and others, and it was killing me that those great stories still haven't seen print.
So over the next 6 months or so, all those stories will appear there. Noirotica.net will also include profiles of artists and writers who work in dark crime with erotic or taboo elements, like Iceberg Slim, Charles Willeford, Screamin' Jay Hawkins, Lydia Lunch, and others. It's very much a when-I-have-the-time project, but at least I've gotten the site up now, so it should be updated fairly frequently -- which will be very gratifying, since the stories from Noirotica 4 have been stranded for years at this point.
I also write as N.T. Morley and I still have eight books under that name due to several publishers I work with, so that's my life for the next few months. After that, I have these wacky plans to script an online serial sci-fi graphic novel, as soon as I find the right artist to work with. I liked writing the script to Whipsmart, but it was largely an instructional film and it made me realize how much I want to write a script for a fetishy, ultra-futuristic, noirish sex movie or comic. I'm hoping to create something where Neuromancer, Sandman, and The Matrix meet Michael Ninn, Michael Manning, and The Art of Bondage.
Also, Alison Tyler and I are talking about doing a second pair of collaborations, though we're not sure what they're going to be. They'll definitely be collections of short stories, but there are several ideas we're working with right now so we're not sure which ones we're going to do. I think Alison is one of the most amazing erotic writers, and it's a real privilege to work with her. In some ways her writing couldn't be more different than mine, but I just adore it; it's so innocent and romantic and dirty and taboo all at the same time. Her writing never fails to turn me on, and she is just a fantastic person to work with so I know we'll go on collaborating.
I'm not really sure how much your readers care about my day job and event organizing, but one big thing that's been taking a lot of my time during the day is the Good Vibrations Holiday Ball in San Francisco, which probably will have happened by the time this gets published, and will no doubt have been a truly fabulous gig -- it's a fetish ball that I'm organizing with the other people in my department at Good Vibrations, including Carol Queen. There will be some really wild fetish outfits if last year's event is any indication, and we'll have drag kings and drag queens, kinky rockabilly, Japanese taiko drumming, and erotic belly dancing. I organized medical education meetings as my day job for years, so it is so much fun to get paid to put together these crazy, pervy events where everyone lets their hair down and gets really wild. It's a very nice break from writing, something I'm very lucky to say about my day job!
I've recently started getting into doing erotic photography -- at the moment I'm really not very good, but I'm learning. I hope to be able to start exhibiting some of my photography on my Web site within 2-3 months. What I'm hoping to do, if I can learn the technical skills to do it, is tell the same kind of stories I tell in my fiction, particularly by creating gothic and noirish images that are powerfully erotic.
I often am inspired to write a story based on an intense erotic photograph, though you might never know it from the finished piece. Both in my physical arts and in my writing, I'm very influenced by photographers like Phyllis Christopher, Charles Gatewood, Amelia G & Forrest Black of Blue Blood/Gothic Sluts/Barely Evil/Rubber Dollies, Richard Kern, Dave Naz, and Kelly Lind, all of whom do kind of evocative edgy photographs that are incredibly stylish and sexy. I hope I can add a bit of a noir or goth element to that, though all of those artists (especially Amelia & Forrest) already explore a lot of that terrain. I'm also working on a series of "treated" photographs, where I take framed erotic photographs and add physical elements -- broken glass, shotgun shells, blood -- to make the photograph three-dimensional. In that, I'm kind of influenced by the Reverend Steven Johnson Leyba, who did an excellent book for Last Gasp a while back that was a series of his reproduced journals with drawings and text, with additions built out of found objects including body fluids and the like.
Right now my work is all very cheesy and first-year art-student in style, but I hope to develop it and be able to subject my readers to some freaked-out visual arts in the near future. I can't draw to save my life, so I guess this is my way of working with some of the visual images in my head that don't work as stories.
Oh, and models willing to bare it all (and work relatively cheap) can feel free to e-mail me if they're interested in modeling.
CS: Finally, if you could assemble all your readers and potential readers together, what would you like to tell them about you and your writings?
TR: Oh, wow. I'd tell them to send me naked pictures of themselves. Jpegs, please, none of this bitmap bullshit. Also, I would tell them to each send me ten cents so I can pay someone to clean my apartment. No, wait, I'd ask them to read my Web log. And tell everyone they know how brilliant I am.
And I'd tell them thanks for reading my stuff; it really does mean a lot. Every time somebody wanks to a Thomas Roche story, an angel gets its wings -- and contrary to rumor, god does not kill a kitten.
I'm unlikely to get rich doing this; I do it because it really means a lot for me to have people enjoy what I write. That's pretty much what inspires me, is the thought that I have readers who actually give a damn what I do next, whether it's horror, crime, or porn. Send me fan mail, it really does keep me going!
