Dear Butch,
Excuse me while I clean up the puddle dripping from between my legs and cool my blushing skin. I have spent the past two weeks curled up with Sinclair Sexmith’s new book, Sweet & Rough. And when I say curled; I mean toes curled, legs spread, nipples hard, hips rocking, and gasping for air. I had to make a mid-book run to my local gas station at the wee hours of the morning to purchase batteries and a sports drink. Simply said, this book is orgasmic.
I have been a long time fan girl of Mr. Sexsmith. Their work touched me while I touched myself as a young queer first discovering the love of the butch-femme dynamic, kinky sex, and the idea that love and lust could in fact be a real combination. Sugarbutch (www.sugarbutch.net) was the first blog I read on a regular basis, pouring over their words like a student prepping for an exam. It was there that I discovered that what I found kinky wasn’t sick or strange; that wanting to be roughed up, owned, desired, fucked, challenged, and held sweetly could all happen in one single afternoon romp. That kink and romance could co-habitat together in the most beautiful way. Mr. Sexsmith showed me the light I was seeking and I haven’t turned back.
Earlier this summer I saw a call for bloggers to interview Mr. Sexsmith (sorry, the submissive in me can’t help but to use a formal address). My whole body felt like it had been hit with lightening, the possibility of getting my painted fingers on their new book and interviewing them blew my femme mind. So I put on my bold face and sent an email, thinking that among all the strong hitters in the blogging world that my little pink blog would be passed up. And then, the email came from Mr. Sexmith and I nearly fainted. Holy fuck, he picked me (among many others, see the full list here…http://www.sugarbutch.net/sweet-and-rough/). I have no idea who I fucked to get this lucky, but I am glad I did!
Sweet & Rough is what I consider, the best kind of smut. Mr. Sexsmith has crafted stories of play and passion that are so realistic that you can easily see yourself in the characters. They create situations that are totally possible, sometimes with a large dose of luck on your side, and spin together a tale of kink that is totally inspirational for newbies and veterans.
Without further adieu, my Sweet & Rough book interview with Mr. Sexmith. I am in pink, they are in black. Oh…and buy your own copy of Sweet & Rough at http://www.sugarbutch.net/sweet-and-rough/!
- The depth and detail of your stories in Sweet & Rough provide a full sensory experience. Are your lusty tales purely imagined or they inspired from personal experience?
All of these stories are fiction, so none of them are exactly about a particular experience that happened. But as is with any fiction, the emotions and inner landscape that is depicted are based on real experiences and real feelings, real observations of how our inner landscapes look and feel. So there is always some truth to them. I often have a particular girl in mind, and tap in to some feeling I had in a particular scene—though fiction is more of a patchwork quilt of feelings and experiences than it is written from one in particular. I write those, too—the more memoir-sex style writing, and those are thrilling and a lot of fun, but I rarely publish them. They are almost always exclusively published on sugarbutch.net.
- The kink community is massive with a vastly wide variety of roles, fetishes, and practices. Do you feel pressure to represent the community as a whole or do you stay in the zones in which you feel you can best represent?
The kink communities are far more vast than I—just one person!—could ever represent. There are just so many fetishes and interests that I don’t understand and couldn’t adequately express, since I just don’t “get” how they work. Sometimes, things I don’t get are really fun to write about, to explore in writing, to see if I can figure them out through the act of going into them with a pen and ink. I do feel some pressure to have my collections be diverse enough that they aren’t just repetitive, though, which has been often said about my books so far. It’s true that I have a very particular palette, and so if you connect with that palette, you’ll see the incredible nuance within each of the stories, but if it’s not really your thing (or just the edge of your thing), it might seem more repetitive. In Sweet & Rough, I tried to pull stories that had many different sex acts, and there are handcuffs, rope bondage, flogging, and caning, but there are a lot of similarities, like public sex, strap-ons, blow jobs, butch/femme friction, and pick-up first-date play.
- Everyone in the kink world has their limits. Do you have any kinks you won’t write about? Where won’t you go with your characters?
I have kinks I *haven’t* yet written about, but I’m not sure I *wouldn’t*. I’m writing less and less about my own personal desires, though, so in some ways, my own sex life is just not the open book it was four or six years ago through my journaling on sugarbutch.net. I’m really interested in erotic transparency as both a form of modeling to others, and as a way of keeping myself honest and integrated. Some of my personal kinks I haven’t explored much yet in my writing are feet and toe sucking, and nipple sucking.
I went through a rough few years in 2012-2013, and there was a big part of my erotic life that I wasn’t writing about and wasn’t recording, partly because I was in such grief and sadness that the fantasies felt really fucked up. I wasn’t sure how much I’d stand by them after I got back on my feet. And while it is really interesting what the body does and where the erotic mind goes when in trauma, those aren’t particularly fantasies that I would dive into and write about.
It’s really hard to write about things that the larger queer or sex-positive communities would deem “problematic.” I’m not sure how to do that, or how to talk about it when I am attacked for wanting (or getting) those things. I’m really curious about that, though, so I may, at least someday, write about that.
- You have written many amazing stories that have kept many of us fans very happy. What is the story you want to tell, but haven’t been able to tell yet?
Hmm. Maybe that’s the “happily ever after” story, the story of a relationship that stays, rather than one that escalates until it explodes and breaks itself. I want to know about how to keep a relationship sexually healthy, thrilled, and exciting, for a long period of time—that’s an edge in my own erotic work, and a story I wish I could tell.
- And one non-book question, because I have been beyond curious. The tattoo on your forearm that looks like a ruler, what is the story behind that wonderful piece of ink?
It *is* a ruler! It measure 6″, or if I put my palm flat onto a table it measures 2″ from my wrist, so 8″ total. It has a lot of layers of representation. I got it the weekend I took the Buddhist refuge vow in 2011. I’ve always been a trail-blazer, someone who is creating my own paths and my own way. The Buddhist path, while not exactly linear, is the most known path I’ve ever been on, and the symbol kept coming to me over and over while I was in the meditation retreat that weekend. I also like how I can make all sorts of sexy jokes about it, like, “I always have six inches on me.” I also initially conceived of it when I would get into (mostly in jest) arguments about precisely how high those femme’s heels were, and so I joked that I’d now be able to settle that bet. Mostly when muggles ask me about it at the supermarket or wherever, I say that I’m a graphic designer (which is true, I was professionally for about 10 years) and I like how it’s a functional tattoo, not purely aesthetic.
I also saw a ruler tattoo on a forearm of a gay male porn star who liked to fist asses, and that resonated too. I like how it can be very dirty (fisting, cock) or also relatively tame (buddhist path, graphic design) and that it has so many layers that it will grow with me.
…swoon…
Love,
Femme
Dear Butch, ... Love, Femme 