Outside the Lines: Black Lesbian Lit
by Linda Villarosa, June 14, 2006
A monthly column exploring entertainment on the East Coast

Read any good erotica lately? Probably not if you're looking for African-American lesbian love.

Black women--straight girls--are having plenty of literary sex. The explosion of African-American women's erotica is one of the most healthy and also surprising trends in book publishing today. That was the big buzz late last month at Book Expo America (BEA)--publishing's annual industry confab.

This year 25,000 booklovers crammed into the yawning canyon of a convention center in Washington DC where 2,000 publishers hawked their wares for thousands of booksellers from around the world.

In the African-American interest section of nearly every bookstore, novels like Making Him Want It, Crackhead, Riding Dirty on I-95 and Nasty Girls, are hip-checking literary superstars like Edward P. Jones, Toni Morrison and Zora Neale Hurston off the shelves. At this time a couple of years ago, authors of this so called "street lit" or "ghetto fiction," were hawking their self-published paperbacks on 125th Street in Harlem or selling their books out of the trunks of cars or at beauty shops. Now they have multi-book deals.

Simon & Schuster and other mainstream publishers have bounded onto the bandwagon, buying or building black imprints comprised of gritty books about urban life that feature plenty of sex, guns and did I mention sex on every page.

The rise of these down and dirty, lust-charged books has sparked vigorous debate in African-American publishing circles. Author Nick Chiles spoke out recently in a buzzy New York Times op-ed piece called "Their Eyes Are Reading Smut." In it he described urban fiction as "tasteless pornography." A BEA panel just before the conference kicked off showcased the debate, with much hand-wringing and heated back and forth. "Street lit has overtaken our literature," says Clara Villarosa, co-owner of Hue-Man bookstore in Harlem, who created the event. (Okay, yes, I'm quoting my mother--so what!)

The most famous of the African-American dirty girls is Zane, the pseudonym of a suburban Maryland mother of three. Her books, including Afterburn, Gettin' Buck Wild and Addicted have sold 6 million copies. She now has a movie deal and her own Simon & Schuster imprint. A typical Zane passage: "He was huge. I knew that there was no way I'd ever be able to take the whole thing down my throat, but I was willing to give it the old college try."

Zane's characters--and those of her bestselling literary little sisters Nikki Turner, Vickie Stringer and others hump anything and everything except each other. So sex, sex, sex and more sex, why no lesbian sex?

Black gay men—and the rest of the planet—can get their groove on with E. Lynn Harris's characters. His books, beginning with 1999's Invisible Life have sold millions of copies. His just-released novel, I Say a Little Prayer, landed on the the NY Times bestseller list about 30 seconds after it was released. While you can get a vicarious thrill from his books, he doesn't show much love to the lesbians.

Lesbian Lit "Bliss"

But there is a great black hope: Keep an eye out for Fiona Zedde, who's been called a female E. Lynn Harris. Last year, she served up a sexy Sapphic romp in her debut novel Bliss. Her main character, the ultra-chic hottie Bliss Sinclair, dumps her boyfriend and sets out on a carnal adventure with a lesbian bad girl as her tour guide. The two get busy in an abandoned warehouse, a private fetish club and in Bliss's office.

While Zedde shouldn't bother to book a flight to Stockholm to pick up a Nobel Prize in literature anytime soon, Bliss, which was nominated for a 2005 Lambda Literary Award, is good, light, escapist fun.

"Erotica does extremely well for us, and Fiona is very good at writing sex scenes," says John Scognamiglio, editor-in-chief of Kensington Books, which published Bliss. Kensington has been knocking out gay and lesbian books since the mid-90s and began a line of African-American titles in 2000. Heidi Rosebrugh, manager Lambda Rising Bookstore in Washington DC, says Bliss was a surprise bestseller that "sold extremely well" in her store.

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