This week we're delighted to host this short story by Jane Traies, revealing what really goes on at lesbian book festivals, apparently ...
GENRE FICTION
by Jane Traies
I wouldn't want you to think I went to York looking for sex. I'm not that kind of person - honestly. I didn't even want to go to the festival, until Lee and Jan talked me into it.
‘Do you good,’ Lee grinned. ‘Time you got out and met some new women.’
‘But,‘ I protested, ‘I’m not a two-thousand-women-at-a-disco kind of girl.’
‘Just come to the bookfest, then,’ said Jan promptly. ‘You can’t be a librarian and not be interested in books, now can you?’
Which is how I found myself, that Friday morning in October, in a crowd of over-excited lesbians at York Race Course. Since Lin and I had broken up I’d not been out much - I suppose I’d become a bit of a hermit, really - so from the moment that good-looking woman in uniform (think NYPD Blue, think Bad Girls) asked to see my ticket, the whole thing rather went to my head.
Friday was wonderful. I did everything. Saw and heard all my heroes -Val McDermid, Manda Scott, Sarah Waters - reading from their brilliant books. Librarian’s heaven – and Jackie Kay still to come! But on the Saturday morning, when Lee and Jan set off to a session on lesbian erotica, I said I’d see them later. It’s not that I’m prudish - I like a good sex-scene as much as the next reader (and since I get first pick of the new titles, I’ve read rather a lot) - I just didn’t fancy sharing the experience with a roomful of strangers. I studied the programme again. Lesbian romance? I’d rather lost faith in that since Lin walked out on ours, so in the end I followed a smaller crowd upstairs for something called The Spice of Life.
The title hinted at the variety of the line-up. The author of A Different Light (Meditations on Lesbian Spirituality) was swiftly followed by a comic novelist with a cheeky grin and faultless timing; the third writer was on a mission to revive sci-fi as a lesbian genre. We’d already hi-jacked crime, romance, the historical novel and sword-and-sorcery, she said, but no-one had taken lesbians into outer space since Joanna Russ in the seventies.
I wanted to ask her if anyone had considered capturing the Western for dykedom. That’s my secret vice, westerns. People expect librarians to like highbrow writing, so I don’t tell people about my obsession. I read westerns, watch them, collect them. I even have a lesbian video with a western theme. Well, I suppose it’s erotica, really, if I’m honest. It’s about this mysterious cowgirl who arrives at a lonesome ranch just as the woman of the house is taking a shower… My fantasy cowgirl.
I came back to attention as the microphone was seized by the last author of the session: a butch dyke in bike leathers who’d written a string of books about the adventures of an irresistible-to-women butch biker. As soon as she started to read, I knew I wasn’t going to escape public sex after all. And just as I was feeling glad that I was sitting on my own at the end of a row, a latecomer dropped into the seat next to mine. I hoped I wouldn’t go too red.
The sex in question took place mainly on the back of a Harley, and involved a lot of muscle control and some axle-grease. Could have been quite exciting, you might think – but it was so badly written that by the time our hero took her overworked dildo in hand for the fifteenth time, I was choking with the effort not to giggle.
The woman who’d come in late caught my eye and grinned.
Oh.
Tall, lean. Seriously handsome. Denim shirt. (Think early Clint Eastwood, think Joan Crawford in Johnny Guitar, think All Torch and Twang.)
Think Fantasy Cowgirl. Now I really was going red.
And the funny thing was, she was at every panel I went to after that. She didn’t sit next to me again, but she always managed to catch my eye.
‘I’ve changed my mind,’ I said to Lee as we applauded Jackie Kay. ‘I think I will go to the disco, after all.’
It was no exaggeration about the two thousand women. It might have been ten thousand, they made that much noise. And of course, it was far too crowded for me to have seen her, even if she was there. I felt such a fool. You can be very lonely in a happy crowd, and by midnight I had had enough. As I started to push my way towards the exit, I felt a hand on my arm.
Western shirt, this time. Cowboy boots. Slow smile.
‘Dance?’
And we did. All night. She held me dizzyingly close; and, as the last dance ended, she bent her head and kissed me. And then – oh, dear, I’m going red again right now, thinking about it - we went outside and had sex in her car. Yes, I know! Really. In the car park at York Race Course! Oh my god.
So there you are. That’s how it happened.
I know what you’re wondering. Which kind of western is this? Did they climb into the horse-drawn buggy and ride off side by side to the happy-ever-after, like in High Noon? Or did the mysterious stranger tip her hat in farewell to the little woman at the ranch house door, like in Shane, and clip-clop away into the setting sun?
In westerns, the ending can go either way. Certainly we have both kinds in the library at Little Muchlock.
You choose.
[First published in the Festival Programme for the York Lesbian Arts Festival 2005]
