The book selection at Good Vibrations is full of books about LGBT sexuality and erotica, and adult-themed content.

Spurred by the recent online commotion now known as #amazonfail, we’ve created a special link that will give our customers 25% off our entire book selection at GoodVibes.com. We feel these books should be read, shared, and never censored. If you ever needed an excuse to build up your library, now’s the time!

Go to the site through this link: http://tinyurl.com/cjxfng

Thank you!

Sadie

p.s. I am open to hearing suggestions for the title, I have a long list of possibilities, but none that I’m totally in love with yet.

Whore Lover: Lovers and Partners of Sex Workers Speak
An anthology of non-fiction essays written by the non-paying partners (queer-trans-straight) of sex workers about their experiences and feelings regarding their unique position in the marketplace of love.
From casual dates, to long term relationships, to going down in flames, Whore Lover will explore the personal narratives of people attracted, intimate and in love with those who work in the sex industry.  Present and former lovers and partners of sex workers are encouraged to submit. Whore Lover is looking to represent the stories of a multiplicity of people: people of color, trans, queer, gay, straight, of all ages. Partners in all areas of the sex industry will be featured.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:
*Day to day negotiations
*My partner and I turned each other out
* I was a trick and then became a lover
*Loving a Sex Work Celebrity
*My partner’s job turns me on
* My partner’s work inspired me to be a sex work client
* I’m a sex worker and I only date other sex workers
*How I deal with family and friends around my partner’s work
*How I’ve dealt (or not) with my own ego around my partner’s sex work
*My partner switched jobs within the industry and how that worked for us
* My partner’s sex work is a secret from everyone (including me?)
*I broke up with my partner because of sex work

People who have dated/loved/married all variety of sex workers including but not limited to: porn actors, strippers, FBSM/sensual massage providers, street-based workers, tantra providers, erotic body workers, sexual surrogates, escorts, fetish workers, phone-sex workers, pro-Dominants and pro-submissives,  are welcome to submit.

A limited number of interviews are possible to those who are interested in having their voices heard but  feel more comfortable talking than writing. First-time writers definitely welcome. No poetry, please.
Pseudonyms or anonymous submissions are fine and will be honored.
Pieces should be between 1000-7000 words.

Please submit via email attachment (pdf or doc file) to: partnersanthology@gmail.com

There’s a lot more to what we do at Good Vibes than celebrating porn. Some nights we drag home after a long day’s work and would rather read the Sears catalog than cue up a blue movie or open a smut book. On the other hand, porn is more than just a product around here. Besides its obvious use as a sexual enhancement tool, it’s also a type of cultural communication that speaks volumes about the way we view sex, about our desires and fantasies — how things are and how we wish they were. Focusing explicitly on sex is still essentially taboo (if you don’t believe me, see what happens when you bring it up at Thanksgiving dinner), so porn is rarely looked at with much depth — although that is starting to change, and as theorists and academics and regular folks take a hard look at porn’s staple images, porn writers and filmmakers gradually explore new directions. Women’s voices, especially, are increasingly heard — a change we welcome with open arms.

So when we do an event that centers on porn, we do so because we sell it and like it — some of it, anyway — but also because talking seriously about porn is seldom done, and it’s interesting and useful to do it. Plus, people are fascinated by erotic images, and when we do a clips show or a panel, folks come out in droves. It’s partly voyeurism, but it’s also the desire to hear sexuality discussed in a public forum and (especially) in an intelligent way. For a culture that sells just about everything via erotic imagery and that is ever more sex-saturated, lots of the sexual discourse around us just isn’t very nourishing — especially if you’re looking for brain food. So when we showcase porn, we want to buck that trend. It’s not that we don’t want to present porn as sexy — it’s just that we insist on the right to be smart about it, too. One of the reasons sex isn’t considered an appropriate topic for discussion at Thanksgiving has to do with the fact that the erotic (and especially erotica) isn’t seen as an intelligent thing to discuss — the mind-body split, and all that.

But that’s not how we see sex at all, and we want to influence others not to see it that way either. To that end, we are again sponsoring a panel at the annual San Francisco Bay Area Book Festival, a wonderful melange of authors, readers, and row upon row of books. This year’s panel, co-sponsored by Cleis Press, is called “A Cinematic History of Porn,” and it features authors whose books look at film and video porn, especially porn made in the 1970s. Joining me (I’m moderating) will be Annie Sprinkle, world-renowned performance artist and porn queen, author of Post Porn Modernist; Jack Boulware, cultural critic and sometimes satirist, whose book Sex, American Style explores the 1970s, a.k.a. “the Golden Age of Heterosexuality”; and Eddie Muller, co-author of Grindhouse, a fascinating book about adults-only cinema in the 20th century.

This promises to be a lively gang with whom to discuss porn: Annie Sprinkle has lived the life of a porn star and a commentator on contemporary adult movies; she knows the culture of porn-making in and out, and yet her feminism makes her something of an industry outsider. She’s a loving critic and a role model for each new generation of women in porn. Jack Boulware left no stone unturned when he set out to celebrate the Swinging ’70s, and he can be by turns sardonic at the decade’s kitschy excesses (remember mink penis jewelry?) while still paying homage to a time when over-the-top sex had its day in the sun. And Eddie Muller is a historian for the rest of us (he’s also into boxing and film noir), a guy who can trace cinematic pornography’s roots almost to the beginning of cinema and link it to other underground film genres like slashers and sexploitation. Actually, I’d be delighted to sit down with these people to discuss almost anything — I know the panel is going to be great.

If you can, join us at Ft. Mason in San Francisco at 11:45 on October 16th. Good Vibrations will also have a booth, selling a wide cross-section of our unique collection of sexuality books.

If you can’t be here — pick up a book and read some sexy prose instead! Or if you insist, go direct to video.

More about the Bay Area Book Festival’s panels and featured authors is available on-line at the San Francisco Book Council’s web site: http://www.sfbook.org.