A Part of the Heart Can’t Be Eaten

Description

In A Part of the Heart Can’t Be Eaten, award-winning author, sex educator, filmmaker, and podcast host Tristan Taormino shares her coming-of-age story, revealing how her radical sexuality and unconventional career grew out of an extraordinary queer father-daughter relationship. Raised by a hard-working single mother on Long Island, Tristan got her sex ed from the 1980s TV show Solid Gold and The Joy of Sex. She spent summers at drag shows in Provincetown with her father, Bill, who had come out as gay in the mid-1970s. Her sexual identity bloomed during her college years at Wesleyan University, where she discovered her desire for butches and kinky sex.
Tristan’s world began to fall apart when her dad was diagnosed with AIDS. After a series of devastating events, she moved to the messy, glorious world of 1990s New York City. In the midst of grief and depression, she helped change queer sexual subculture with her zine Pucker Up, her infamous The Village Voice column, and her editorship of legendary lesbian porn magazine On Our Backs. After the publication of her first book, The Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex for Women, Tristan followed her own path that marked the beginning of her work as a trailblazing feminist pornographer.
After a lifetime of outrageous adventures, Tristan reflects on the bonds, loss, and mental health struggles that shaped her. She weaves together history from her father’s unpublished memoir, exploring the surprising ways their personal patterns converge and diverge. Bracingly emotional and erotically charged, A Part of the Heart Can’t Be Eaten reveals the transformative power of queer pleasure and defiance. In A Part of the Heart Can’t Be Eaten, award-winning author, sex educator, speaker, and podcast host Tristan Taormino shares her coming-of-age story in which she reveals how the roots of her radical sexuality and career grew out of an extraordinary queer father-daughter relationship. Tristan Taormino is a writer, speaker, sex educator, and host of the podcast Sex Out Loud. A former syndicated columnist for The Village Voice, she is the author of numerous books, including Opening Up: A Guide to Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships, Down and Dirty Sex Secrets, and The Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex for Women. She is the founding editor of the annual Best Lesbian Erotica anthologies, editor of The Ultimate Guide to Kink: BDSM, Role Play, and the Erotic Edge, and coeditor of The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure. Taormino has won three Lambda Literary Awards and eight Feminist Porn Awards, among other awards. She lives in Los Angeles. Acknowledgments  ix
Conceived  1
Mrs. C’s  12
Artichoke Hearts  15
First Time  22
The Bunk House  28
Buttercake  31
Sex Ed  38
The Beach House  45
Foxglove  52
P-town  57
The Priest’s Brother  64
Mr. Meltme  69
Time in a Bottle  79
The Shower  83
Slutty  88
No Place Like Home  93
My Closet Has No Door  103
Queer Nation  108
Femme Is My Gender  115
Bombshell  122
Riley  129
Change of Plans  132
Daddy’s Girl  142
Sailor’s Berth  146
The Lesbians Upstairs  153
The Price of Our Redemption  162
Unity  172
Reggie Love  178
Paris  184
Scrambled Eggs with Bette Midler  193
The Wolf  199
Poppie  204
Fallout  207
A Night Like This  215
Pucker Up  219
Anal Sex Made Me  223
Adventure Girl  228
My Gay Boyfriend  234
Heart/Throb  239
Turn Me On  246
Buttman Is on the Phone  250
The Learning Curve  256
Feminist Gang Bang  264
Epilogue: My Father’s Eyes  271

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