Where the Girls Are: Urban Lesbian Erotica

Edited by D.L. King

Book Review by Jean Roberta

D.L. King, an erotic writer in New York who runs the review site "Erotica Revealed," has collected stories about lesbian sex in various cities. The general tone of Where The Girls Are is playful, and the writing is crisp. Women hook up in bars, coffee shops, art galleries and other urban environments where, it seems, anything can happen. The era when lesbians could only meet in shadowy, disreputable places is clearly over.

Several stories show young women from the country, or at least the suburbs, finding their way in the big, wicked city. In "Electricity" by Evan Mora and "Don't Fuck with Country Girls" by Kathleen Bradean, the country girls fend off bar regulars who try to manipulate them, and get lucky with generous, experienced dyke bartenders.

Predictably for an anthology based on sex in the city, most of these stories begin in public places. In "Grey Ice" by Evecho (an Australian), a woman executive surrounded by boorish men in an upscale restaurant meets a woman who understands her, a coolly smoldering stranger who seduces her in the women's washroom. In "A Window to the City" by Victoria Oldham, two regulars in a coffee shop finally speak to each other, and consummate their mutual crush in front of a picture window with a breathtaking view of the city.

Exhibitionism is such a theme in this anthology that the subtitle could have been "Putting on a Show."  "Come to my Window" by Andrea Dale (also the title of a song by Melissa Etheridge) includes a similar scene of sex in front of a window on an upper floor. In "Just One Night" by Dalia Craig, a businesswoman picks up an innocent-looking young woman in a hotel bar and brings her to the penthouse suite. The picture window, of course, is a major attraction:

"She wasn't surprised when Lacey rushed to the window to marvel at the panoramic view. The tapestry of lights that glittered like a myriad of precious jewels scattered haphazardly on a black velvet cloth captivated everybody she invited up to this suite. . . God! How she wished she hadn't ordered dinner so she could fuck Lacey here and now up against the window."

"Afraid of Jumping" by Nan Andrews and "On Display" by Sophie Mouette take place in art galleries, although the settings are very different. In Sophie Mouette's story, a curator's crush on a wealthy patron heats up during a private showing of erotic photographs of women dressed as noblewomen and their maids in the time of the French Revolution. For some reason, the photographer is identified both as “Dorothea Cross” and as “Dorothea Cook.”

Nan Andrews' story takes place in a San Francisco landmark, the Museum of Modern Art, where the narrator is dared by her female lover to meet her in a place that triggers her fear of heights:

"The bridge leads across the atrium, right under the giant skylight. I've never been up here. As I step out onto the bridge, I see Sydney step out from the opposite side. We are the only two people here."

Sydney cleverly plays on the narrator’s fear to increase her excitement and to give her an experience she will never forget. And there is always the possibility of being seen.

The theme of putting on a show includes an intimate, backstage look at the fashion industry in "In the Dressing Room" by Crystal Barela, in which a model and her dresser achieve a surprising amount of physical contact while changing the model's outfits, in the brief moments between turns on the runway. In “Not in Kansas Anymore” by Cari Z., the newcomer to the city finds work as a character-server in a theme restaurant. When she is dressed as Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, her female supervisor (a more experienced role-player) finds her irresistible.

Another theme of this collection could be called "Mix and Mate." In an urban setting, members of different demographics rub shoulders at random and sometimes rub other parts deliberately. Three of these stories feature black-and-white couples. In "Old London Town" by Jacqueline Applebee, a white Englishwoman shows the local sights to a visitor from St. Lucia in the Caribbean. In "On Display," the curator and patron mimic a traditional colonial or American relationship between a younger black maid and an older white mistress. In "Hot Child in the City" (another song title) by Sommer Marsden, a white woman from Connecticut loves the grittier atmosphere of Baltimore, where she meets a hairdresser who learned to straighten and weave hair from her mama and her grandmama.

Of course, neither lesbian nor interracial hookups seem as transgressive of the social order in the twentieth-first century as they did before the upheavals of the 1960s. A truly "mixed couple" in our time is likely to consist of different self-defined "types," such as the advertising executive and the goth girl in Lisabet Sarai's "Rush Hour." Although they are literally thrown together when competing for a taxi in the rain, the two women both discover that opposites can attract.

In “The City Pony” by Roxy Katt, a newcomer from Alberta (western Canada) to Toronto meets a kinky city girl who wants to be “ridden” by a real cowgirl, and she thinks the Albertan would be perfect for the role even though she didn’t grow up on a ranch. Despite the witty clash of Canadian regional stereotypes, this is essentially a fetish story which resembles this author’s other tales about uppity trapped women.

The BDSM scene, as distinct from one-to-one hook-ups, is shown as part of urban culture in "My First Play Party" by Rachel Kramer Bussel and "A is for Apple" by Jessica Lennox, in which newcomers to the city feel magnetically drawn to Dommes who take them under their wing.

The explicit theme of “urban erotica” actually seems to be less consistent in this book than several of the other themes.

It has become a cliché that in some movies about New York, the city itself emerges as one of the characters. Some of the contributors to this book have tried to achieve this effect in their stories. Jacqueline Applebee’s London, Sommer Marsden’s Baltimore, Nan Andrews’ San Francisco, Charlotte Dare's, Lisabet Sarai’s and Victoria Oldham’s New York (complete with landmarks and street names) all have enough local color to set them apart from stories set in other cities. ADR Forte’s “Urban Fairy Tale,” about an enchanting connection between two women who meet in passing, seems deliberately set in a generic urban environment which could be anywhere in any time. Several of the other stories convey an urban atmosphere (the sounds of traffic, the sight of towering glass-and-steel buildings) without identifying the city, and a few of the stories could have been just as plausibly set in smaller towns, or on other planets.

Like the Best Lesbian Erotica series from Cleis Press, this book is a must-buy for fans of lesbian erotica. However, if you want to find the lesbian hangouts in a specific city, there are non-fiction guidebooks for that.

Jean Roberta
August 2009

Where the Girls Are by D.L. King (Editor)
(Cleis Press July, 2009; ISBN 1573443530)
Available at: Amazon | Barnes & Noble

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© 2009 Jean Roberta. All rights reserved. Content may not be copied or used in whole or part without written

About the Author: Jean Roberta is the thin-disguise pen name of a writer who teaches mandatory first-year English classes in a Canadian prairie university and who writes fiction (erotic and otherwise), research-based articles, opinion pieces and reviews. She joined ERWA in December 1998, and has never looked back. Several of her stories can be found in the "Treasure Chest" gallery. Over sixty of her erotic stories have been published in print anthologies, and Eternal Press has released her single-author e-collection of erotic stories in various genres and flavors, Obsession (2008).
Jean is a staff reviewer for the monthly reviews site, Erotica Revealed (edited by D.L. King). She blogs on Livejournal as "Lizardlez" and at www.goodsturdyjeans.blogspot.com. Her website (www.JeanRoberta.com) is a work in progress.
Read Jean's full bio at Erotica Readers & Writers Association.

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