Allison Moon is a queer woman with a bisexual boyfriend or a “bad dyke”–an identity she’s settled on after stints as a “greedy bisexual” and a garden-variety lesbian. She chronicles and analyzes this journey in an essay collection that’s heartfelt, thought-provoking, and good, not so clean fun.
In the book’s first essay, “The Skinny,” Moon writes of dipping her teen toes in Sapphic waters with the lovely Tania. She describes the passion, wonder and excitement of their love in poetic detail: “Her lips were like a velvet overstuffed sofa,” she writes. “I wanted to curl up on them and nap.” But the rose-colored glasses are off once Moon discovers that Tania likes the violent “Stan” by Eminem and has low self-esteem. And though the author does an excellent job revealing Tania’s tragic flaws and discussing the end of their relationship, I would have liked to have seen more of Tania’s personality, specifically those aspects that attracted Moon in the first place.
As the collection progresses, things get kinky as Moon experiments with threesomes, orgies, an erotic piercing, sex with porn stars and, in “Heroes and Villains,” humping a tree. Tree sex may be a little too out there for some, but Moon writes of it in a way that’s not only erotic, but also funny and yes, even beautiful:
The energy from my orgasm shot out of my body, down the branch, down the trunk and into the earth. Then the earth returned it with amazing fervor, up the trunk and up the branch and into my body. … I found a forked branch and I lay back on it . … I wrapped my legs around the trunk, and I felt the tree’s excitement again.
“You are insatiable,” I said to the tree.
