As Queer As You Wanna Be: Avery Cassell & Friends bookparty & reading
Sunday, 5/22, 3pmAvery’s new book is Behrouz Gets Lucky. Join Avery with guest readers Wickie Stamps, Sinclair Sexsmith and Xan West, with your host CQ.
Four local smutty writers, Sunday afternoon, and you!
Avery Cassell - Behrouz Gets Lucky, Sinclair Sexsmith - Sweet & Rough, Wickie Stamps - Io Facc’ l’Omm, and Xan West - Show Yourself to Me.
Avery Cassell
Avery Cassell is an older genderqueer San Francisco writer, poet, cartoonist, and artist who grew up in Iran. They live with their Maine Coon cat, Lulu, and bake yeasted waffles every Sunday morning. You can find their erotic short stories sprinkled in various anthologies, including Best Lesbian Erotica 2015 and Sex Still Spoken Here. Avery is currently working on a book of more of Behrouz and Lucky’s shenanigans, transcribing a collection of aerograms from Iran to the States in the early 1960s, and an illustrated early reader children’s book about a eight year old transgender boy and his family.
Behrouz Gets Lucky is a romantic, literary, kinky, and political novel about two older San Francisco queers - a butch dyke gardener named Lucky and a genderqueer librarian named Behrouz. A coffee date at Café Flore in the Castro sparks a fiery trans masculine relationship that ends with the couple eating falafel in bed at 3am half way around the world in a Tehran, Iran hotel room. Forced gentrification in modern San Francisco goads Behrouz and Lucky to find their own uniquely sexy way of reclaiming the city’s lost queer spaces. Behrouz Gets Lucky is also tenderly sensual – an immersive novel, full of fragrances, delicious food, delirious sexual touch, dandy fashion, and beauty.
Sinclair Sexsmith
Sinclair Sexsmith is a genderqueer kinky butch writer who teaches and performs, specializing in sexualities, genders, and relationships. They’ve written at sugarbutch.net since 2006, recognized numerous places as one of the Top Sex Blogs. Sinclair’s gender theory and queer erotica is widely published in anthologies and online, and they are the editor of Best Lesbian Erotica 2012 and Say Please: Lesbian BDSM Erotica, both published by Cleis Press.
In 2014, Sinclair’s first collection of erotic short stories, Sweet & Rough: Sixteen Stories of Queer Smut, was published. They use the pronouns they, them, theirs, themself. Sweet, sensual adoration and dirty, rough sex meet in this anthology of queer smut penned by Top Sex Blogger Sinclair Sexsmith. The complete collection includes sixteen of Sinclair’s best queer erotica short stories, full of dapper dates, femmes in pretty dresses, flogging, bondage, flirting on the subway, bold moves, and (of course) strap-ons. From ongoing lovers to one-night stands, the kinky queer butch top protagonist delivers heart and dominance, over and over.
Wickie Stamps
Wickie Stamps is a widely published writer whose work has appeared in The Advocate, OutWeek, Gay Community News and over a dozen short-story collections. Wickie has won accolades for her writing of the staged drama Fugue State (Fringe Festival, San Francisco) and the multiple-award-winning film Foucault Who? Prior editor of both the notoriously hypermasculine Drummer magazine and the equally infamous Socialist Review, Wickie continues to make films, zines, and other work as part of San Francisco’s Heads Will Roll Studios. Keep an eye out for the upcoming Zeboiim, a queerly Southern tale of trauma and crime, and for Io Facc’ l’Omm, a disturbing crossroads of gender and obsession.
Xan West
Xan West is a recent transplant to Oakland from Brooklyn, who has been doing community kink education for over ten years. Xan has been published in over 35 erotica anthologies, including the Best S/M Erotica series, the Best Gay Erotica series, and the Best Lesbian Erotica series. Xan’s story “First Time Since,” won honorable mention for the 2008 National Leather Association John Preston Short Fiction Award. Xan’s work has been described by reviewers as “offering the erotica equivalent of happy ever after” and as “some of the best transgressive erotic fiction to come along in recent years.”
Xan refuses pronouns, twists barbed wire together with yearning, and tilts pain in many directions to catch the light. Xan adores vulnerable tops; strong, supportive bottoms; red meat; long winding conversations about power, privilege, and community; showtunes; and cool, dark, quiet rooms with comfortable beds. Find Xan’s thoughts about the praxis of sex, kink, queerness, power, and writing at xanwest.wordpress.com.
In Show Yourself to Me: Queer Kink Erotica, Xan West introduces us to pretty boys and nervous boys, vulnerable tops and dominant sadists, good girls and fierce girls and scared little girls, mean Daddies and loving Daddies and Daddies that are terrifying in delicious ways.
Submissive queers go to alleys to suck cock, get bent over the bathroom sink by a handsome stranger, choose to face their fears, have their Daddy orchestrate a gang bang in the park, and get their dream gender-play scene—tied to a sling in an accessible dungeon.
Dominants find hope and take risks, fall hard and push edges, get fucked and devour the fear and tears that their sadist hearts desire.
Within these 24 stories, you will meet queers who build community together, who are careful about how they play with power, who care deeply about consent. You will meet trans and genderqueer folks who are hot for each other, who mentor each other, who do the kind of gender play that is only possible with other trans and genderqueer folks.
This is Show Yourself to Me. Get ready for a very wild ride.
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