Note: Here is Kirsti Melto’s article on the Taurus New Moon at her Planet Waves blog called Sphinx.
Friends, Readers, 6D Eronauts:
Yesterday I got lost in the Memorial Student Union at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. This was five minutes after I had photographed a kid giving an old-fashioned Midwestern hellfire and brimstone sermon to students eating lunch on the student union’s terrace. Appropriately enough, I ended up wandering into the campus LGBT Center, where I camped out for a few minutes to rearrange the lenses and picture cards on my cameras. We had an interesting conversation there. I got some giggles when I proposed that they add an M onto the end of LGBT, and I left a stack of Book of Blue postcards on the literature table and was given a handful of awesome sexpositive buttons. (Wearing buttons is not enough.)
Then I found out that Tristan Taormino would be speaking as part of some kind of awareness week festivities here, sponsored by the student organization Sex Out Loud.
Tristan, creator of Pucker Up magazine, is something of a self-publishing genius. She then wrote the Anal Adviser column in the Village Voice for nine years. Her first book, a guide to anal sex for women, was made into a film, then she found her calling as a director.
She does the kind of books and videos that make you want to try what she’s teaching you about. In other words, she is the quintessential sexpositive feminist, who has dispensed with political correctness and is doing the work of the Goddess on the planet. I was already spending the day with the hottest date in the city, who was happy to go. I called my friend Jeff Patterson, a medical professor at UW who is a scholar and presenter on the history of sexuality, and said you have to see this woman speak.
We arrived in the lecture hall, in the riot-proof Humanities Building. I needed to get permission to tape the presentation and take photos, so I was presented to Ms. Taormino to get that consent, where I had one of the honors of my career. I introduced myself, hoping she remembered an email I wrote to her in 2001, and she said: “Oh, that’s funny, just yesterday I was reading my Planet Waves Taurus horoscope…”