Whip Smart
By Melissa Febos
(Thomas Dunne Books)

In her new memoir, Whip Smart, Melissa Febos -- who'll be reading at Eros on April 4 -- examines, with frankness, generosity, and unexpected grace, the four years she spent working as a dominatrix in a midtown Manhattan dungeon. Readers are invited into the world of high-price humiliation, in dungeon rooms decked to the nines in the accoutrements of masochistic fantasy, where Wall Street types pay huge sums to be flogged, diapered, and pissed on. Her revelations are often funny, occasionally sad, and fearlessly candid. Febos also writes of the heroin habit that led her to accept the job, and details the emotional strain and psychological effort of kicking addiction. She speaks with the SFBG about life as a professional domme and the process of turning that life into memoir.

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San Francisco's sexiest new magazine, Original Plumbing, will be hosting a reading at Books Inc. this Thursday for the official launch their much anticipated second issue. Considering the diversity, scope, and increasing visibility of FTM culture, it's mind-boggling that Original Plumbing -- "OP" -- is the first magazine of its kind. Now that Original Plumbing is here, let's ensure that it stays.

Though locally headquartered, OP isn't limited to the scope of San Francisco. The magazine takes care to address topics, like last year's Trans March in Paris, that are relevant to the international FTM community. Politically charged as it is, OP is also visually compelling on an aesthetic level that you don't have to be gay to appreciate. Amos Mac's explicit photography of FTM bodies are the perfect conceptual counterparts to OP's literal content. Throughout all of this, OP is full of fun and lighthearted, campy humor. Even the sex readers are made so aware of refuses to take itself too seriously. Judging from the manscaping-themed second issue (titled "Hair Issue"), beefcake is an integral aspect of OP's editorial philosophy. Read more »

When I was a young reader first discovering poetry -- and still very much under the thumb of my strict Asian parents -- I blushed (for obvious reasons) whenever I encountered e. e. cummings' name. In those prudish days, were I to know that cummings penned some of the most deliciously sensual poems of the last century, I might have been frightened off literature for good. This hypothetical is redundant, as I wasn't scared off poetry and eventually outgrew those jejune ideas of virtue. This hypothetical is further redundant because his erotic poems were never published together in the same volume until now, in Erotic Poems, a new collection of cummings' amatory verses and sketches.

Readers will delight in these works, which are as naughty as they are tender, bemused as they are earnest. Consider the below, from "16":

(may i touch said he
how much said she
a lot said he)
why not said she Read more »

IMPOSSIBLE PRINCESS

By Kevin Killian

(City Lights)

Author Kevin Killian's relationship to sex is too complicated to be pinpointed as merely "homoerotic," but homoerotic encounters are a frequent occurrence throughout the stories in Impossible Princess, Killian's latest collection of gay short fiction.

Killian's stories are full of nervous energy. The pace of his writing is jerky and striated, and events change and adjust so suddenly that Killian's words read as if short of breath. The panting quality of the work is, in terms of form, utilized most effectively in the writer's vivid and ominously perceptive descriptions of sex. These sexual encounters are often baffling.

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