Hard to believe this book is twenty years old. It still thrums with energy and danger. Half a lifetime ago, I discovered it at a friend’s house, devoured it, and started saving up to buy it myself. This was in the days before Amazon and Google Books. I had to take a bus to the nearest big city, forty-five miles away. (Even there, it wasn’t OK to be an “angry woman.”) Slide the scary Medusa cover off the store shelf, carry it to the cash register, look the clerk in the eye, hand over the money. Tuck the bag under my arm and leave quickly, gingerly, like I was carrying a truth bomb. A wonderful secret.

The secret was power. Even at the fringes of my utopian fantasizing, I never could have dreamed up these radical women. They fascinated and frightened me. Rereading, I felt attracted, repulsed, confused, excited, maybe even a little ashamed. Because they were thinking bigger and wilder than I’d ever dared.

If you didn’t come of age with this book resting conspicuously on every friend’s thrift-store coffee table and cinder-block bookcase, here’s the deal: interviews with sixteen female intellectuals, artists, sexual pioneers, performers, and iconoclasts. People like Kathy Acker, Susie Bright, Diamanda Galas, bell hooks, Sapphire, Lydia Lunch. Even their photos were amazing. But when they started speaking….just, WOW.

(One of the more surreal road-not-taken experiences of my life was being propositioned by Kathy Acker in a ladies’ rest room. But that’s a topic for a stand-alone post.)

The most enchanting interview was the last in the volume: Susie Bright, the lesbian “sexpert.” Her voice came across as funny, wise, unafraid, encouraging. Also, she was comfortable being sexual in her own skin in a way that I had never seen before. Her sexuality was not calculated to impress a male gaze. It was for herself, and for women more generally. My mind, as they say, was blown.

I began seeking out everything she had written, including:

During the eighties, at the height of anti-pornography feminist activism (think Dworkin and MacKinnon), Bright and some colleagues in San Francisco founded a magazine “for the adventurous lesbian.” Lots of flesh, frank sex talk, and (for their time, and possibly ours) daring features, such as butch centerfold subjects. Considering that the leading feminist periodical was called off our backs, on our backs was the obvious title for the pro-porn dykes.

Reading Susie Sexpert’s Lesbian Sex World, a compilation of the sexual advice columns Bright had penned for on our backs, was like having a really freaky, incredibly cool big sister. She could tell you which lubes worked best for certain activities. Why your sex toys must always, always have a flared base. Where to find “the Cadillac of vibrators.” She described her experiences teaching a fisting workshop, for crying out loud! All I could think to myself was, “In San Francisco, they really are different.”

Now for the buried lede: Bright has written a memoir, published last month. Given her reputation, I was expecting a juicy tell-all of her conquests. But Big Sex, Little Death is not that book. The reality is both more and less eye-opening.

As it turns out, being a sexual trailblazer is kind of a drag. (The health insurance sucks, for one thing.) You end up around a lot of skeevy people. Sex work, lest we harbored any illusions, is just that: work. And the mortality rate for queers of all stripes over the past few decades has been way too high.

Yet the story is also thrilling and hilarious: its subtitle could be I Was A Teenage Communist. From a youth saturated with labor activism and sexual precocity, the journey to lesbian provocateur is a logical progression: Bright claims,

When people ask me how I became a professional writer, I couldn’t give them a “climb the ladder” scenario, because I went out of my way to be part of a group. Everyone was supposed to know how to write, run a web press, unclog a toilet, stage a demonstration.

(n.b.: “web press” is not what it sounds like. We are talking handmade galleys, X-acto knives, offset printing, messy ink, mailing fees, censorship laws, and so on.)

Ah, the glamorous life of a pornographer. Is it better or worse to glimpse into the worlds of your heroes?

***

Around the same time Angry Women came along, I was also discovering Throwing Muses. Many of you already know how I adore Kristin Hersh, who fronts my all-time favorite band. If there were any justice in the world, you’d hear her voice on the radio every day, and she’d have been handed a MacArthur grant ages ago. Hersh has also recently written a memoir. Everywhere but the U.S., it’s called Paradoxical Undressing, also the name of the musical/spoken word/video projection concert tour of the same material. I am not sure why we get stuck with the title Rat Girl, but at least we get the cool Gil Hernandez cover illustration.

Hersh’s book is a genuinely good read, more of a novel than a straight-up “I remember…” tome. The language is unexpected, slightly off-kilter, and fresh, just like her songs. If anything, the plotting seems a little over the top. Then you remember that it’s not “plotting,” but what actually happened. Like starting a band with your stepsister when you’re fourteen years old, and percolating in the Boston club underground until becoming the first American act signed by British art-rock label 4AD. Being too young to get into the clubs you’re headlining. Being diagnosed as a schizophrenic. Recording your first video while nineteen and hugely pregnant. Rat Girl covers only about one tumultuous year in Hersh’s young life, and it’s not at all clear that the ending will be the happy one we know: a healthy woman performing all over the world for two straight decades while also being a wonderful mother to four (!) sons.

(By the way, here’s an amazing 1999 clip of Hersh on Danish television talking about being a rock star, all while nursing her baby. All I can think to myself is, “In Denmark, they really are different.”)

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pkbuafm_B4&feature=related[/youtube]

Here’s a “trailer” for the book. So stunning.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3SRrS-dEwQ[/youtube]

As Hersh describes it, she doesn’t write her songs; it’s more like they write her. They grab and don’t let go. Maybe that’s why this is such an arresting read.

Do you want your face grabbed and shouted at? Probably not; at the very least, it’s irritating. But now that it’s happened to me, I know music is as close to religion as I’ll ever get. It’s a spiritually and biologically sound endeavor–it’s healthy.

Some music is healthy, anyway. I know a lot of bands’re candy. Or beer. Fun and bad for you in a way that makes you feel good. For a minute. My band is…spinach, I guess. We’re ragged and bitter. But I swear to God, we’re good for you.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-CUPw_gjYI&feature=related[/youtube]

One thing Bright and Hersh seem to have in common is that they really couldn’t be anything else. They do because they are. I admire that so deeply, and wonder why some of us have that courage and others don’t. They also utterly demystify their professions, a move that seems rooted in feminist awareness. Reading their memoirs, I couldn’t help but notice that both were daughters of highly permissive, successful fathers in academia. Both are children of divorce. Both left home early. Both have struggled financially, but are happy. Both harness the power of anger, but have moved far beyond being merely “angry women.”

Coincidence?