My new column, “Embedded,” at the San Francisco Bay Guardian

It wasn’t until I actually had a cocktail in my hand that I remembered, fifteen year old me probably had this as one of her life goals. A sex column! I know! As terribly ambivalent as I have been for the last few years about sex writing, sex columns, and the whole business of sexpertise (as distinct from being smart about sex in a way that defies what the market tries to reign those smarts in with), I’m really happy about this opportunity to do a sex column my way.

“Embedded” launched this week with the San Francisco Bay Guardian’s sex blog, SEX SF. In keeping with this theme of late of getting right into the thick of a new project and then letting the analysis come later (a true first for me), I didn’t really get what I was doing with the column until I had to explain it at a reading on Friday night. “Embedded” is my attempt to tell real sex stories simply, to get out of the way and really let a person’s life emerge. I admitted to the audience at Femina Potens that this is probably due to my listening to way too much This American Life for the last year. What I love about Ira Glass and Co.’s approach to storytelling is that most of the time, the folks on the air are not famous, and if they are, the stories they tell are tangential to that status. “Embedded” is not a place to showcase sex celebs; instead, I want to capture the parts of San Francisco sex we rarely see.

I’m proud of what I’m doing, of tossing my little bit of framing around the bigger picture of sex here, this city I always considered my sexual center. Even as I write, I can feel that shifting, the focus that San Francisco has held for me expanding. Writing this column is a love song and a bittersweet one, because for all the great PR San Francisco sex has got going for itself, in books and blogs and all the rest, it still so often focuses on the loudest, biggest, baddest. I’m going searching for something else, lives a bit less incendiary but no less brilliant.