from the Greens cookbook (1987) written by the chefs of the same-named restaurant in California to which I have never been.  So sad.

found the most beautiful Cinderella pumpkin at the Cortelyou Farmer’s market.  It would have made a wonderful carriage, green like patina on copper, frosty white in patches.  Not being a fairy godmother, I made a soup instead.  It was a hefty pumpkin, and I used half, approximately ¾ pound or 4-5 cups when cut in chunks.

halving a pumpkin and skinning it is not for the faint of heart—a serious knife should be employed for the purpose.  If you don’t yet have a beloved blade then ask a friend with kitchen wits and witchery (and a bit of cash flow) to get you a good Chef’s knife for your birthday.  A fine knife will make you more eager to cut up veggies and entices your foodie friends to cook in your kitchen.  Back to the pumpkin: plunge your knife tip into the skin near the stem, the bottom is usually the flattest part of the thing and should sit steadily on your cutting board but having a friend help you steady it is not a bad idea, and carefully bear down along the whole blade, towards the bottom of the pumpkin.  Pull out the blade and start again as often as you need.  Bit by bit is better than a dramatic cleaving and trip to the emergency room.  Repeat on the other side.

scoop the seeds and goop from the pumpkin halves.  if you want, reserve some of the seeds for toasted pumpkin seeds, and pile up at least some of the seeds and all of the pulp to use for the stock.  slice of the pumpkin skins and set aside for stock as well.  cut the pumpkin into slices about an inch wide then across to make large chunks.

wash one medium or two small leeks.  Slice off the greens and set aside.  Slice down the center of the leeks and across into thin half moon strips.  Smash and peel two or three cloves of garlic.  Scrub and chop a few carrots or parsnips (parsnips are really nice) and several ribs of celery.

in a large pot, heat a tablespoon of olive oil.  add the garlic and leek greens and stir to coat and cook a few moments.  stir in the celery.  add in the pumpkin pulp and seeds and a few stalks of parsley.  Salt and pepper the whole lot.  Pour in about six cups of water.  Bring to a simmer and cook for about 20 minutes.  Turn off the heat and let cool a bit before draining, squeezing the rich broth from the veggies by pressing them in a colander over a bowl or pot.

in a soup pot, heat a few slugs of olive oil.  add the leeks and stir, cooking over a medium flame until they begin to soften.  toss in the pumpkin and carrots, stirring to coat.  Cook for about 9 minutes, stirring occasionally or often depending on how wide or narrow your pot is.  salt and pepper (white pepper if you have it) and stir in a handful of sage and/or thyme.  Pour in the stock and bring to a simmer.  Cook for about half an hour (sometimes longer) until the pumpkin begins to fall apart.  Stir it every once and awhile.

add a few cups of cooked white beans* and a cup or two of the bean cooking liquid and stir.  Cook for another 15 minutes or so, until the pumpkin is an orange velvet background to the beans.

top with a drizzle of olive oil, chopped parsley and a squeeze of lemon or swirl in a spoonful of plain yoghurt, crème fraiche or sour cream.  Serve with piles of warm, excellent bread.

* to make the beans: pick through two cups of dried small white beans, like navy beans, and remove any bad beans or junk.  bring a pot of water to a boil, about three time the amount of beans.  turn off the heat and add the beans and let sit for an hour.   rinse the soaked beans in cold water, combine with fresh water in the pot, add in stalks of fresh or dried sage and thyme and bring to a boil.  cook for about an hour or al dente.  drain, saving some of the cooking liquid.

An uncanny amount of witchery and religion I have had at this change of the seasons.  Among them, an interfaith gathering to address domestic violence, and the full moon over the ocean at Coney Island and Janna swaying, bent over her single tea light, spangles glinting in the blowing hem of her turquoise skirt.  A clutch of us burned our wishes and baggage and let it blow off the fire escape with the candle smoke.

Thus feeling metaphysical, I could not help but ask my sister-girl-sister friends over a bottle of red wine: What is a soul anyway?  And what does it have to do with sex?

An excellent conversation, especially when the friends work for sexual justice.  The abortion rights activist descends from a long line of progressive Protestant ministers, and the public health scientist comes from a family of conservative Italian Catholics.  For the record, my family is Sicilian Catholic.  My mother, however, when asked why she did not raise me in the church, said, “Because I had a daughter.  And I loved her.”  Plus, for a place founded on a birth by a single teenage mother, it felt ironically hostile to her at the time.

By the end of the bottle, we concluded, more or less, the soul is the essential part of ourselves that is somehow internal, ethereal and transcendent.  Sexuality, being an essential part of every person—a normal and natural part of being human— is part of each soul.  Maria adds that asexuality must be included in the spectrum of sexuality, what we express and enact and what or who attracts us.

I had found a book of writers interviewing writers, The World Within, and it offered us this passage:

Rikki Ducornet: I think the sexual soul has to do with sexuality informing one’s entire being.  I always think of sexuality as the heart of who one is.  I think the sexual soul means one delights in the natural world and isn’t frightened of other bodies or new experiences.  A sexual soul is intrigued by other cultures, delighted by new music, by the sensuous experiences of language.

Naming this sexual soul or soulful aspect to sexuality bridges a soul/body disconnect perpetrated by our Western philosophy and religion, the traditional deliberators of the soul.  Many people of faith and those in the HIV and AIDS community have rejected this artificial dichotomy, arguing that it damages individuals and our communities.

To wit, we’ve been double-f***ed: from Judeo-Christian narratives of earthly suffering as a pathway to heaven to DesCartes, “I think therefore I am.”  If you include our Puritan heritage, we have a ménage e trios of repression.  On this foundation, informed by (dare I say) patriarchy, our modern cultural and institutional practices regenerate this disassociation.  We live it out.

Rev. Krishna Stone has been working for over a decade in New York to facilitate change within faith communities to support sexual wellbeing and support individuals in reunifying their whole selves.  So I went to talk with her too.

“What I do in my work is to reconnect sexuality with spirituality,” she said.  She facilitates personal and cultural shifts from an idea of sexuality that is connected with disease and damage to one rooted in our personality, our essential self, our soul.  The soul being this thing about us that just is; “no religion needed,” she notes.

“It’s all dislocated.  Like an eyeball over here, and a vagina way over here,” and she enacts the fragmentation many of us feel, waving about her golden hands.  She shares a blessing offered at a World AIDS Day vigil at Judson Memorial Church:

… We bless the condoms and lubricant as we nurture people:

to not let culture, media, religious or government institutions, schools, our friends and family tell us what our sexuality means or what we should do with it; to have sexuality be responsible, healthy and satisfying; to learn how to negotiate safer sex with confidence; to be open to support from peer educators and other allies who continue to bring the message of HIV prevention to communities; to have sexuality not be a thing of shame and embarrassment; to see sexuality embraced; and to know sexuality includes all feelings, thoughts and behaviors associated with relationships that include intimacy, as well as sensual and sexual activity.

ALL: Our lives matter.

To the One who has the creative energy for our greatest good, we bless the safer sex kits as we advocate for people:

to have more options for safer sex such as vaginal and rectal microbicides; to see it easier to negotiate a relationship, not so devastating; to see less hypersexualization of youth in our culture; to access safe sapces or support groups to share openly about sex, intimacy and relationships;  to see more attention paid to the perception and impact of images we all receive, including pornography; to see people less frustrated in their desire to express themselves; and to see sex as a deeper expression of the God or Goddess within to create love in our lives.

ALL: Our lives matter.

She gives a workshop for HIV-positive women called Spirituality: What the Hell is It? In one exercise, the group makes two lists of words, those they associate with “spirituality” and with “sexuality.”  Time and again, the words for “spirituality” are Christian-centric and abstract, and the list for “sexuality” is full of painful and intensely personal words like damage, rape, and nasty.  Pleasure is rarely mentioned, relegated to the realm of luxury.  Hardly surprising since sex for many women is not a free choice but a transaction, security or duty.  Pleasure almost always secondary.

What if pleasure were central?  There is an idea of the soul as our basic goodness, the piece of God or Everything that is in us and in every living thing, creating mutuality and connection.  We (and our partners) can be fully present, connected to our own bodies and souls, for our partner’s ecstasy, the moment of orgasm imagined as a place beyond words in full harmony with the perfect resonance of Everything.  Where you can hear the heartbeat of you, her and the universe.  To have sex this soulful way seems to honor the divine in each of us and seems like love seems like God to me.

In our brutal society, moments of feeling connectedness to everything can be precious and fleeting.   To move soulfully through the day, to be fully present, takes tremendous courage.  It makes you vulnerable.  There’s a lot of static.

Krishna and I talked about inexplicably soulful sexual moments or soulful moments erotically charged.  “It’s like falling in love immediately,” she snaps her fingers.  An honor.  When her whole body, mind and soul says, undeniably, “Yes!”

After heartbreak, barriers surround your soul at full depth and strength, feeling all the windows of your soul blow open in a moment of sexual connection, I add.

To experience yourself as having a sexual soul, perhaps, is to have done the work to be able to feel these moments, recognize them.  Krishna said, “You have to believe in this kind of magic for it to work.”

But so much of what we believe twists us away from our sexuality, our bodies.  Many of us have experiences that break the sexual soul: sexual abuse; sexual shaming; misinformation; silence, silence and more silence.

It is easier to heal when a community supports you.  Some ministers believe if faith communities had accepted and supported gay men, particularly gay men of color, we would not see the AIDS epidemic as it is today.  Despite the work of such leaders, there remains much to be done to engender theologies that resonate with the bodily experiences of those of us most vulnerable to HIV infection, sexual assault and other injustices.

Although we have inherited this tradition of a soul/body divide, text and tradition can be reclaimed as tools of justice for our bodies and souls, united.  At the corner coffee shop in my Brooklyn neighborhood, a local minister explained to me that the roots of the word “salvation” are in old language for healing the body, like a salve.

Krishna thinks part of this healing is acknowledging sexual pleasure as a sacred right.  She said, “In my church, every service, we’d ask for a show of hands of everyone who orgasmed last night.  Raise your hands!  Hallelujah!  Amen!”

All of these conversations drew me back to the following passage from Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, where I first remember hearing the call for healing the disassociation of sexuality from our souls and God-talk:

Here’s the thing, said Shug, the thing I believe.  God is inside you and inside everybody else. … She say, My first step from the [idea of God as an] old white man was trees.  Then air.  Then birds.  Then other people.  But one day when I was sitting quiet and feeling like a motherless child, which I was, it come to me: that feeling of being part of everything, not separate at all.  I knew that if I cut a tree my arm would bleed.  And I laughed and I cried and I ran all around the house.  I knew just what it was.  In fact, when it happens, you can’t miss it.  It sort of like you know what, she say, grinning and rubbing high up on my thigh.

Shug! I say.

Oh, she say.  God love all them feelings.  That’s some of the best stuff God did.  And when you know God loves ‘em you enjoys ‘em a lot more.  You can just relax, go with everything that’s going, and praise God by liking what you like. …  God made it.  Listen, God love everything you love—and a mess of stuff you don’t.

God loves a mess of stuff you don’t love or understand.  She loves our wildly variant bodies, tangles of addictions and fears, and struggles to thrive.  Perhaps if voices like these from the faith community seized the values political platform, we would see federal funding for needle exchange, dissolution of the racist imprisonment system, and health care for all.

In my own faith tradition of offering yet more reading, here’s some good ones to illuminate and heal the sexual soul:

• Sensuous Spirituality: Out from Fundamentalism by Virginia Ramey Mollenkott
• The Survivor’s Guide to Sex by Staci Haines
• Possessing the Secret of Joy by Alice Walker
• Cooking as Courtship by Susan Wiegand

I remain astounded that anybody ever stumbles across this space.  Especially since that brief disappearing act then broke my digital camera stunting the original photography that once graced this virtual wall of post-it writings.

Anyway, I am thrilled to be able to be found, according to the Word Press tracker, by searching the following terms and equally thrilled that people are searching for: pink emerald lady; st. mary magdalene coat of arms; mermaid silhouette sitting; queer islington; anal penetration by demons; baking all pink; recipe stovetop granola cast iron toast; what do you mean by heavy cream; radical queer; mary magdalene goddess; naughty muffin king pictures; and poem for chocolate muffin.

The most visited recipe is for pineapple upside down cake deluxé.
The most visited narrative is Congregation of Coney Island in the Church of Brooklyn Lights.
The most visited video: Lesbian Phone Sex.

Join the crowd and click on in…

i have become my mother and her mother before her
savoring the peace & chatter  of our own minds
with a cigarette and cup of coffee at the kitchen table
even a bad cup of coffee or cold
a cup of anything, really
for my grandmother, in the mornings sometimes
a diet coke
i don’t go there very often

and maybe, maybe
the company & chatter of someone we love,
who opens our hearts, makes us feel closer to our own souls
usually, children or lovers or friends who might as well be

then we’ll hear you, clarion
and tell our stories truly

and perhaps make you pancakes
or something else fried; in olive oil, bacon fat or butter by generation
to salve it all
and feed these souls, now revealed
hungry

put a large pot of water on to boil.  scrub 6 small potatoes; I like the red ones.  Quarter them and plop them into the water at a rolling boil.  Cook for 8-10 minutes or until soft.  Drain and return to the pot if your pot can stand the up-coming beating or dump into a heavy bowl.

add three tablespoons of butter to the potatoes.  Sprinkle liberally with sea salt and pepper and herbs; pick about 2 tablespoons of fresh thyme if you have it, but this round I just used dried thyme and basil, about a teaspoon each.  Drizzle with about a ¼ cup of heavy cream.  Using one of the most fabulous inventions of all time—the hand potato masher—mash mash mash.  Save a few lumps for texture, having left the skins on helps some bits hold together (plus – pretty!).

shred about ½ a cup of hard cheese like parmesan or gruyere would be nice; we had some schmany delectable cheese I cannot remember the name of now.  Beat an egg or, to be really decadent, an egg plus one yolk.  Stir in half the egg and most of the cheese, just saving some for decorative pre-table topping, into the potatoes with a wooden spoon.  Set aside the egg in a shallow bowl and whisk in a little cream.  In another shallow bowl, spread panko flakes or bread crumbs.

heat a cast iron skillet or your heaviest, if you are not blessed with cast iron, which should acquire as soon as possible.  Add a bit of olive oil or butter or a nice half’n’half mix of the two.

form the potato mash into patties, dredge quickly in the egg/cream, press a few sage leaves into it – or one big dramatic one- then press the patty in the breading, flip and press the other side.  Fry.  A few minutes on each side, going for golden brown.  Transfer to a toweled plate to rest and drain excess oil.

you can fry two or three potato patties at a time, just be sure not to crowd the skillet.  Dredge out any escaped bits of breading before they burn and taint your oil.  This does not have to be a deep fry job; using just enough oil for things not to stick creates plenty of golden fried goodness to satisfy.

these are freaking amazing.  I cannot imagine what they would not be good with, but here are some ideas: oniony, garlicky sautéd greens like kale or collards; veggie sausage (which I like to pepper a lot and eat with maple syrup) and a fried egg; red lentils with plain yoghurt and hot pepper sauce; fried apples’n’onions…oh, yes- with sour cream.  I love fall.

I thought I had been to the pinnacle of bus-trapped insanity last summer, when I sat pinioned between adolescent girls popping jewel like jelly candies and chattering on cell phones about big city shopping shopping shopping, half drowning out the Chinese dubbed Tom & Jerry cartoons with Japanese subtitles but not the little butterball boy pin-balling up and down the aisle, burning off the giant soda and fries mama fed him at the rest stop.  Oh yes, and oh—only to be topped by my most recent trip, coming home to Brooklyn breezes after an ill-timed vacation into the sweltering swamp that is our nation’s capitol in August.

I bought a ticket with a new company for some hope of not watching a movie, because the passengers vote whether or not to have one.  I enjoy bus trips, even long ones, especially long ones, except for two things: the bad manners of fellow riders and forced media.  I typically bring earplugs, but sometimes I forget and sometimes they’re inadequate.  I’ve yet to acquire any nifty music playing/earphone device.  So, I am compelled to at least listen which leads to watching whatever Hollywood swill they foist upon me.

As we’re departing, the bus is only three quarters full.  There is a salt and pepper haired, tattooed dyke a row ahead of me, who delves immediately into her book.  A Caribbean family with several small children make their way to the back.  The white guy across the aisle helps me figure out how to work the seats and offers me a Ritz cracker before wrapping himself in wires and hunkering down behind his laptop.

Overall, the passengers vote to watch a movie.

“Tyranny of the majority,” I mutter.

I cannot remember the options now, but the group also voted for A Bronx Tale.  “Good choice,” the bus driver approves.  “It’s good for kids,” he adds.  “There’s some swearing.  And some violence.  But no sex.”

And pops in the cd.

Some swearing, apparently, means the F-word as punctuation.  And the N-word as an integral part of dialogue.  This is a Robert De Niro film, and the violence is graphic.  Mafia-style shootings.  Threats and bullying.  Racist brutality.

Excellent, edifying movies for children, no?

This is the great American perversion.  Creation and tolerance of visceral violent imagery alongside puritanical veiling of sexuality.

Oh my God!  Breasts!  Cover the children’s eyes!

What would have been the same audience’s reaction had the driver shown, say, Boys on the Side or Philadelphia?  I’ll admit it would probably be very uncomfortable to watch Shortbus or Fire with my busmates.  Given the types of special gentlemen who often seat themselves beside me, it would be awkward at best.

What about Bend It Like Beckham?  Wasn’t that rated G?  I’d be fine to be trapped with a G movie to accommodate the most sensitive audience members.  Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, Akeelah and the Bee—bring them on.

Really, though, can’t we all just read a book or something?  Here are some good ones for your last long rides at the end of vacation season:

• Ultimate Gay Erotica 2009 by Jesse Grant (Editor)
• Baby Remember My Name: An Anthology of New Queer Girl Writing‎ by Michelle Tea
• The Fan-Maker’s Inquisition by Rikki Ducornet
• The Art of Simple Food by Alice Waters (not about sex, but in my opinion, very sexy and what I was reading or trying to read on this trip!)

put your biggest pasta pot on to boil, and butter a large casserole dish that can go in the oven.  heat your oven to 375°.  When water is at a rolling boil, add a box of elbow noodles, spirals or other happy, short shape of creamy sauce holding pasta.  Cook until al dente and drain while chopping veggies or making the sauce.

gently wipe clean a pint of mushrooms then separate their caps from their stems.  Chop the heads and mince the legs.  Set aside in two little bowls; you will need 6 little bowls to set your mise en place for this recipe.  The Radical Muffin kitchen recently had a perfect set of nesting glass bowls move in so the cook is blissed out with happy, obsessive pre-chopping and arranging.  Peel and chop a medium sweet onion, yellow.  Chop three very green, delicate celery stalks.  Shred a block of white cheddar cheese on the largest opening on a box grater.  Drain two small cans or one big can and one small can of tuna – dolphin safe for heaven’s sake.

in a heavy bottomed sauce pot, melt two to three tablespoons of butter over medium heat.  Add the onions and celery when the butter begins to foam, and sauté until soft, about 5 minutes.  Stir in a teaspoon or so of celery salt.  Toss in the stems of the shrooms then the caps and cook for a bit longer, until they begin releasing their juices.  Sprinkle a small handful of flour (about three tablespoons or less; I have small hands) over this cooking base and stir, cooking the raw taste out of the flour for a few minutes.

pour in ½ a cup of heavy cream and a 1 ½ of whole milk slowly as you stir.  Cook to simmering but do not boil and stir in a handful of shredded cheese.

eyeball how much of the pasta you will need to fill your casserole dish, and mix that amount with your sauce in a big bowl.  If you like, and my best friend likey-likes, stir in a package of frozen peas or fresh if you are so lucky as to have them.  You will likely have remaining pasta, for which there are 50,000 uses, and possibly sauce, which is great over broccoli, omelets, potatoes or more pasta.

in the casserole, make an initial layer of sauced noodles, about halfway.  Sprinkle with a handful of cheese, and fork the pressed tuna out of the cans and over the noodles.  Top the fish with another layer of noodles and liberally grind fresh pepper over these and sprinkle with celery salt.  Cover the entire casserole with shredded cheese and dust with paprika.

bake in the oven for about 12 minutes or until the cheese is browned and melted.  Traditionally, this is topped with crushed potato chips, which is a pleasure to be tried at least once.  Buttered bread crumbs or pink flakes also add crunch.  But for the purest comfort, I cannot help but love the gentle chewy crispness of cheese alone.

the radical muffin is working on a new zine of poems and recipes, due out at the end of September.  Here is a preview:

i think i was 5 when my mom took me to see the play at the local community college.
the actors and  the actress  ran across the stage in college-people
clothes: jeans and t-shirts
they were running in timed bursts, crossing the stage alone then slightly
after someone else had started dashing from across the opposite end of the
stage then on an angle at the same time as another.

they were all acting that they were late to start the show and couldn’t find
their wig-shoes-props-pants even and
the audience is here they stage-said to each other hurry hurry hurry
they were acting about what they’d be doing if they were not already
acting to show the kids in the audience—my mom said this particular
production was for kids—that later they would be acting

it would all be make-believe
we had an agreement, all of us, to engage in a temporary fabrication of truth

and  the actress, she sat on an empty stage in dim purple light on a bench
with a fine blue scrim hanging across half the stage, her behind it,
pretending to hold a mirror, pretending to comb her hair
talking about her beautiful purple hair

how she loved it, how she was so
glad of it, born with it, purple hair that was really waist length, wavy and brown
she cried out, oh! please God!
please! don’t ever let me be normal!

and i could not speak
she took my breath.

she seemed so powerful, to say she had purple hair and now it is true
and she really touched her real hair
stroked it and i could feel how soft it was and she didn’t want to be normal

i loved her with my whole fucking 5 year-old high femme girl-child heart.
and my heart pounded fast for her and i was afraid that it could not be true
for us
gorgeous reveling freak

today, reveling, I am paying homage to Audrey Hepburn
Breakfast at Tiffany’s in motorcycle boots
vintage black velvet minidress with a flat satin bow just up-under the
pointy tits
hair frenchly twisted, messy & red; big silver hoop earrings, big black sunglasses
despite the dude who waggled his naked cock at me on 14^th street, i am grinning big and feeling hot

on such dress-up days, it is important to grin especially brightly at girl-children
wearing the fashion explosions of their own orchestration
their young, fierce force of will apparent
those girls dangle back and turn to look look look as their moms keep hold
of their small hands
smile vastly, generously, in-depth
yeah—it’ll be okay, girl.  we just have to be each other’s superheroes.

adopted from nigella lawson’s domestic goddess for Brooklyn kitchens

2 cups granola

1 cup buttermilk

¼ cup neutral oil like veggie (olive oil will taste strongly in a sweet muffin like this)

2 eggs

1 cup of flour

¼ cup of sugar (white or brown to compliment your granola)

preheat your oven to 350° and line a twelve-cup muffin tray with papers or butter the little bins.  Measure your buttermilk into a big measuring cup and beat in the eggs and oil.  In a big mixing bowl, pour all the liquids over the granola.

to measure flour for baking, stir it with a fork in the bag to loosen, scoop into a measuring cup and level off the top by running the flat side of a butter knife over it.  (Unless you are making Cake – then triple sift your flour.)  Gently stir the flour and sugar into the granola slop, just enough to combine, over-stirring toughens your muffins.  Spoon the batter into the muffin tin and bake for 15 minutes, until the tops are golden brown.  Serve with butter and jam or honey.  Phenomenal warm but will keep for a day.  Freeze if you want to keep them longer.

The Radical Muffin has adopted an additional blogging project: none of the food but all of the sex.  This is my first post from the new site; you should visit all the smart queer ladies writing at http://thecliterati.blogspot.com/.

After a fraught week, my beautiful friend Maria and I decided to spend a Friday afternoon licking our wounds in the marble womb of the Metropolitan Museum of Art off Central Park. The steps were thronged with tourists. I scooped Maria out of the crowd and arm-n-arm we ascended into the venerable halls of esteemed artists. The cherry on our culture sundae: Michelangelo’s first painting.

The priceless piece, a diminutive copy of a German print titled “St. Anthony Tormented by Demons,” has undergone painstaking, expensive renovations. We slid through the cluster of serious faced admirers, huddling around the painting in a small gallery. The haloed Saint is encircled by demons, brilliantly fish scaled and monsterous; the first kinda looks like it is humping his leg, and the last…

I slid out of the crowd towards the back of the room. Reunited with Maria and whispered aside, “Did you look at that last demon?”

“Oh yah- I looked at that demon three times and thought, ‘oh! he so went there!’”

At which point, we had to leave the room, collapsing in hysterical laughter against each other. Because that last demon can only be described as the Ass Demon, with a winking, gaping pink butthole worthy of all the gay porn in LA.

Perhaps he was just faithfully copying the original print, but I prefer to think he understood the taboo confronting his audience. It’s profoundly satisfying, imagining an adolescent Michelangelo meticulously painting each wrinkle around the anus, cracking himself up with the audacity of it. This is the spirit of the same genius artist who would later defy Church law by secretly dissecting cadavers to learn muscle structure to paint the truth of the human body.

And part of the truth of the human body is a zillion pleasurable nerve endings in all our pink parts, including our assholes. The great equalizer, I believe Tristan Taormino once called it.

Yet the taboo remains, tangled up with fear of gayness for many men and out of bounds, seemingly irrelevant, for many women. Of course, the whole shebang is associated with poop, so it can be literally dirty, which is high on the ookie scale for many folks. The good news, my friends, is that this is nothing a shower cannot remedy, and for the fastidious, enemas.

When the behind has been ignored as a potential erogenous zone, the pleasure from touching, rimming and penetration can take us by surprise. Ladies- spread the good word – it’s not just about the prostrate! Anal play also tends to require a slow hand (or tongue or toy) and a level of relaxing and presence that can be intense in bed.

While there is a lot to be said for normalizing (liberating!) anal sex for the masses, the transgressiveness of the act can be a turn on. Exploring new or disputed territory with a partner makes us vulnerable together, and the trust, gentleness and desire we can show each other through this process…also a big turn on!

So – look to the old masters for inspiration. Begin by looking the ass demon in the eye with Michelangelo then check out some of these excellent resources:

• Luscious, stories of anal eroticism Edited by Alison Tyler Forward by Tristan Taormino
• Anal Pleasure & Health: A Guide for Men and Women by Jack Morin
• Bend Over Boyfriend video by Carol Queen

And add your own to the list, por favor!

PS…the secret is lube lube and more lube.