I have no idea how to write a first message to someone on a dating site. I pick something that they have in common with me and mention I noticed it blah, blah, blah. No one ever responds, or if they do, it's usually them saying I seemed rude or critical and I have no intention of being like that. I must have a tone that everyone notices but me in my writing. Please tell me what a first message should say so I can actually get a response from anyone.  More >>

photo by Tiffany Woods

Brandy Martell

I am a woman of Hispanic descent. My parents came here from Colombia and Cuba. Throughout my life, I never really faced discrimination as a Hispanic. I've faced more adversity for being female. During the 2008 election, I picketed against Proposition 8, in San Luis Obispo (where I lived at the time) during a Thursday night farmer's market. One night, a man approached me in a hostile and aggressive way, getting right up in my face. I don't remember what his line of reasoning was, but I do remember him yelling "you people."

"You people are what's wrong with this country!" he yelled.

I realized what he hated about me: He thought I was one of them -- one of the gay, lesbian, queer, bisexual, or transgender people who have filled my life since I was a child. At that moment I realized what a hate crime was and just how ugly ignorance makes people. I bring this up because a hate crime recently happened and I have to talk about it.

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Back in the day, I had fuck buddies. No strings, no ties. I considered them my "disposables." Before I found a sex-positive community, I never thought happiness could be found in relationships. I was convinced that people cheated as a matter of course, so I never had a boyfriend. Enter "Jake," as we'll call him. He was a bouncer at a well-known dance club in San Luis Obispo; we each attended Cal Poly at the time. What started as a one night stand turned into a year of a whole lot of sex.

However, we began to tread the lines between just sex and a relationship. Granted, we each saw other people, and we were honest about that. Eventually Jake and I approached the point where what we had would either turn into something else or it wouldn't.

I was about to turn 30, and my father had just gotten very ill. I was at a hospital one morning while my dad was having a procedure, and my phone rang. I looked at the screen and saw that it was Jake. I let it go to voice mail.

When I checked the message, however, it was not Jake's voice I heard. It was the voice of a very angry woman. She said her name and identified herself as Jake's long-suffering girlfriend of five years. Then she got hysterical.

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Lenore Kandel

Lenore Kandel was explosive -- she was the only woman to give a speech at the 1967 Human Be-In, became immortalized by Jack Kerouac in Big Sur, and just like her buddy Allen Ginsberg, had a pamphlet of her work seized by police because of its extreme erotic content. Did we mention she was also an excellent belly dancer? Kandel was an important female voice in the predominantly male Beat movement and an activist during the counterculture San Francisco of the 1960s. Her most controversial work, The Love Book, explores female sexuality and gave voice to a generation of repressed women.

Although she has since passed, a tribute to Kandel's life is celebrated with a new release, Collected Poems of Lenore Kandel on Thursday (May 10), at the Beat Museum.

The book features previously unpublished poetry as well as some of Kandel's more iconic works, such as "To Fuck with Love," a descriptive and provocative take on a woman's sexual experience and desire. The tribute also includes a reading from Peter Coyote -- founder of the Diggers, an anarchist theater group notable for providing food, housing, transportation, and medical supplies to the influx of runaways living in Haight Ashbury in the 1960s and '70s.

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A sort of "autobiography as mixtape," Chloe Caldwell's Legs Get Led Astray is a slim, 157-page book of personal essays that are brooding with sex and longing and repetition. It's also full of music, with B-sides like Elliott Smith, Nick Drake, Wilco, Rufus Wainwright, Tori Amos, and Okkervil River, whose lyrics in "Last Love Song For Now" are where Caldwell's title comes from.

The musical backbeat gives Legs a scratchy, ghostly quality. Part of this is also because, in several essays, Caldwell starts nearly every sentence with such phrases as "You had me..." "I wanted to..." "You have a girlfriend now, but..." which gives the book a peculiar cadence, as if it's a past life haunting itself.

The sadness undercuts most everything, whether she's writing about her mother, babysitting, or sucking cock. Sometimes the sadness is obvious, as in when she profiles a friend who committed suicide: "I don't know if I ever loved him. I just know that I wanted to be him. I just know that some days I want to drink a bottle of liquor and roll around on his grave." Sometimes it's less so, like when she's describing the aftermath of an orgy. "She saw I was awake and because she's my best friend she immediately saw I was depressed and told me not to get up. She told me to lie back down, and said, 'Just pretend you're on a magic carpet.' I pretended I was on a magic carpet, and for a moment, everything felt better."

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​"Though she was a tiger lady, our hero didn't have to fire a shot to floor her. After one look at his Mr. Leggs slacks, she was ready to have him walk all over her. "

So reads a 1970 ad for Mr. Leggs. Its glaring grammatical error aside (hello, dangling modifier), the ad is so revolting it almost seems laughable. As does the one for Chase & Sanborn coffee: "If your husband ever finds out ..."

It makes us (as a society) wince, or at least I hope it does, but it can also produce a shrug. "Oh that's just Mad-Men-ish retro kitsch and no longer our problem." We can feel smug, thinking we have achieved something in the past 40 years. We might continue, "No one would dare print something like that now."

Right? Wrong.

This ad below for Belvedere Vodka came out last month with the accompanying Twitter post that read, "Unlike some people......Belvedere goes down smoothly."

Because of public outrage, the company apologized and made a donation to RAINN (Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network). Okay, groovy, but the image has already done its damage. It exists.

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Rhi Neuroptik

Is this the face of someone you'd mess with?

Facebook can be big brother, let's just be honest about that. How many people do you know who have been fired, fought with a partner, or gotten into trouble of some kind because of a post on Facebook? If I did not make my living the way I do, Facebook would cease to exist for me. While I personally couldn't give a flying fuck what people think about my posts, there are those who take Facebook seriously. Which brings us to nightmare dating experience number two. (Read about my first nightmare date here, "Sex and Romance in the New World: Four Nightmare Dates."

I had been on a few dates with this man, who was very funny, smart, and fun. He was quite helpful and eager to please. But it wasn't long before it became clear that he wanted to be daddy. In the dating world, I've come to realize that a lot of men try to be daddy, whether or not they realize it.

Let me make it clear: Not all women are looking for a daddy. I might quickly embrace you, but the second you insult me, undermine me, or essentially pat me on the head and call me pretty, nothing good will come of it.

Part of this man's daddy tendency came out in his dating history, which was interesting, and which he readily shared. While I believe people should share past dating experiences, at times it can be a bit overwhelming. I find that those conversations should happen over time, not all in one sitting. He pointed out how he made life better for a lot of girls. (I found it interesting that he called all women girls.) Part of his seduction is his whole "I want to help make girls lives a better place" schtick. He also pointed out how much money he spent on each "girl" in order to help her make her life better.

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Chas Redmond / Flickr

Sandy Bottoms has been a performer at San Francisco's Lusty Lady for two and a half years. She identifies as a polyamorous queer femme, and she also dabbles in porn and independent escorting as well as history and activism. She belongs to the Bay Area chapter of the Sex Workers Outreach Project. Here she offers tips to those who visit the Lusty Lady. A version of this ran on her blog, Diary of a Peepshow Princess.

Having witnessed hundreds of patron's experiences behind the glass and visiting as a customer a time or two, let me give you a few bits of advice on how to get the most out of your trip to the Lusty lady peepshow.

Follow the rules: Whipping out your phone, fancy iPads and cameras makes us buck-naked ladies way nervous, even if you are only checking a text. Most of us are not out about our jobs and would like very much for our images to stay right were they are.

Don't pretend you're at the zoo: Remember when Tatiana the tiger mauled that obnoxious guy at the SF Zoo a few years back? Beware of harsh reprimands and flying stilettos if you dare bang on the glass or taunt us.

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Who knew? A periodical called Sexoogy from the 1930s.

Are you afraid that people are judging your paltry, boring home library? You know those barren shelves need more of everything: fiction, nonfiction, poetry, magazines, and periodicals. But where can you find replenishments, volumes that might be rare and maybe even a little racy? Saturday marks the first Library Spring Smut Sale at the Center for Sex & Culture.

If you think the offerings consists of cast-offs, the likes of which you spot haphazardly displayed on someone's front steps or outside a BART station entrance, you're mistaken. The center's library boasts an impressive collection of mostly donated materials, and it seeks to maintain items shunned by traditional booksellers, libraries, and museums. Saturday you have the chance to look through items it chooses to sell.

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Greta Christina

If not "Oh, God!" what does an atheist say in the throes of sexual passion? Although that sounds like the start of a derisive joke, it illustrates how some people who don't believe in a higher power feel about how they're treated in a city that prides itself on tolerance: not tolerated, specifically in alt-sex circles.

Four leading writers, educators, and activists in queer and kinky communities assemble Thursday (April 26) at the Center for Sex and Culture for Godless Perverts, a public debate on the issue.

Organizer Chris Hall (who wrote a strong post titled, "Why Sex is not Spiritual" for this very blog) says judgmental and condescending attitudes exist around godlessness in kinky and queer communities, although here in the Sexual Mecca spirituality takes the form of goddess worship or tantric rituals rather than tent revivals. The result, he says, is that for nonbelievers such as himself, BDSM dungeons or queer-pride parades can seem as unwelcoming as the "red state" regions they fled.

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