Lesbian Sex Educator Was NYC’s Real Life Carrie Bradshaw

It feels such a relief to talk to Tristan Taormino. Someone normal, at last, I think-someone who takes sex seriously. We start off talking about her fantasy role play classes and her new workshop titled, “Kinky Mommy Play.”

“Nobody else teaches it,” she says. “‘Daddy’ is usually the revered archetype.”

Then we get into pegging (yawn, so mainstream now) before segueing into talk of “breakthrough lovers,” meaning that partner who takes you to erotic places you’ve never dreamed of. “And once you’ve gone through that door you can’t go back-you’re changed as a sexual being,” Taormino says.

The sex educator extraordinaire breaks off to give me a tip-off about a “women’s leather party” in L.A. (where she currently lives) called Silk and then we’re on to anal sex—Taormino’s claim to fame. In 1997, she wrote an unexpectedly popular book, The Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex For Women, which has sold 140,000 copies to date.

“I’ve had my fingers up so many asses,” she writes in her new memoir, A Part of the Heart Can’t Be Eaten, “that I can tell what kind of day you’ve had and what the future holds.”

Her voice is upbeat and breezy as the conversation turns to her uncle who, improbably, turns out to be the reclusive, pointy-head novelist Thomas Pynchon, author of Gravity’s Rainbow. He loved the now-legendary lesbian porn mag On Our Backs that she edited for a while in the 1990s. The magazine celebrated controversial issues that sex-negative feminists expressed outrage about in the “lesbian sex wars” of the 1980s: butch/femme, sex toys, S/M.

“He’d be like, ‘I see what you’re doing. I get the power dynamics.’ He was willing to engage with the subject matter in a meaningful way.”

And then suddenly we’re on to how she’s reconsidering “bottoming” after years of being a dom. As well as a new thing she’s just tried—“sounding.” This is followed by her dream of making a “pansexual porn musical” and then some helpful advice on STI prevention when hooking up with someone whose sexual history you’re unsure of: Saran wrap-thin, FDA-approved latex panties called Lorals that protect you from bodily fluids during cunnilingus and rimming. “They’re amazing!”

In these days of TikTok so-called “sex experts” and endless internet misinformation, Taormino is the real deal. The trailblazing teacher, activist, writer, podcaster, agony aunt, pornographer and self-described “queer dyke,” has earned her spurs, having spent over 25 years on the sex beat.

Susie Bright, the influential sex-positive feminist writer of the 1990s and co-founder of On Our Backs, describes her as “one of the great sex educators of our times. Her ability to communicate across every conceivable community is truly transformative.”

Best of all, Taormino is still hungry. Her book A Part Of The Heart Can’t Be Eaten is an entertaining and important historical document and what makes Taormino’s story especially interesting is that she hails from the days before the internet took over. Her heyday was the 1990s, a time when sexual exploration could still be underground, so it had time to mature. It wouldn’t be until 2011 with the publication of Fifty Shades of Gray that the mainstream finally got to learn about concepts such as “vanilla sex” and “safe words” which had already been mother’s milk to Taormino for 20 years.

From an early age she was fascinated by the sensations of her body. She started to masturbate at 5 and her high-school years were prolific in sexual experiments with boys. By her teens, she’d become hip to alternative lifestyles because her father, Bill, who left the family home in New Hampshire before she turned two, came out as gay and she spent many summers at drag shows with him in Provincetown. Yet, she writes, “although sex fascinated me, I got the feeling I hadn’t unlocked all there was to it.”

That was all to change with her “breakthrough lover,” Jen, whom she met at Wesleyan University in Connecticut in 1991. Jen was outspoken about topics such as sex, sadomasochism and lesbian porn. Taormino lists the heady firsts that Jen introduced her to: she was the first woman to fuck her with a dildo, the first person to tie her up, the first person to spank her, the first person she watched gay porn with, the first girl she fucked with a strap-on, the first girl she ever stripped for, the first girl she ever bought a tie for.

Taormino rejected the polite politics of the campus Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual Alliance (GLBA) by helping to found a group called Queers United in Crushing Homophobia Everywhere with the acronym of Q.U.I.C.H.E. She wasn’t just interested in little old “sex.” She was into big “radical sex.” Its roots were in movements like Queer Nation, the activist organization created in 1990 in New York City. She and Jen spent their first summer vacation in L.A. in 1991, going on Pride marches with the group, protesting George Bush’s refusal to acknowledge the AIDS crisis and police and street violence against queer people. They debated issues like disability justice and sex workers’ rights and made slogans, including “We’re Here, We’re Queer, Get Used to It”, which is still doing the rounds today.

It was with Jen that Taormino experienced an epiphany while being introduced to the delights of anal sex—a moment that would also further her professional success.

“I went into outer space. I felt pressure at the opening, then her finger sliding into my tight space… The feeling was so intense I almost didn’t know how to react. My body did. When I added clitoral stimulation to the mix, it was transcendent.”

The experience would change the course of her life. Six years later in 1997, she would write, The Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex for Women which became an unexpected hit and launched her career teaching sex workshops.

It also functioned as a calling card for some fun jobs including a column called “Adventure Girl” in On Our Backs which led to her becoming editor of that publication. The adventures she wrote about included attending a swinger’s party, a paid visit to a professional dom, and “peeing on an adorable submissive butch in a bathtub.”

“Adventure Girl” was followed by a sex column at the Village Voice from 1999 to 2008. Her brief was, “something edgier, with a little more meat,” than what Candice Bushnell’s “Sex and the City” column had offered in The New York Observer from 1994 through 1996.

Taormino’s notorious book also kick-started a career in porn—but on her own terms. In 1999, she co-directed and appeared in a film version of The Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex For Women with John Stagliano, credited with launching the gonzo porn genre. She went on to direct and produce many more movies for the straight market where she innovated by collaborating with the performers–asking them what they wanted to do in front of the camera.

One of her most memorable stunts was a visit to Betty Dodson, the sex-positive pioneer also known as the “godmother of masturbation,” thanks to her influential book, Sex For One. Taormino confessed to Dodson that her swinging-from-the chandeliers dream life contained some dark patches. The anti-depressants she was on limited her ability to orgasm. While she was unabashed about her sexuality, there was still stigma around mental health in the 1990s. “I was broken,” she admits in the book

Dodson’s masturbation techniques helped patch her up, but this is where the memoir gets interesting. She was on antidepressants in the first place because she’d recently tried to take her life. This memoir isn’t just lashings of exotic sex, it’s Taormino trying to come to terms with her gay father who died with AIDS in 1995, when she was just 24 years old.

She scatters her own book with excerpts of his never-published memoir. It’s sobering to read the account of his dying days, a memory of an age when this illness formed a background shadow to the expanding sexual arena. Taormino says writing the book was a catharsis of sorts. “But that’s my core wound,” she says, wryly. “I was too much for my mom and never enough for my dad.

Does she think she used sex to tamp down her anxiety and depression?

“Sure, sex can be about tamping down voices. But great sex is also liberating. You’re in the moment.”

She refuses to see sex as problematic. So-called “sex addiction,” for instance, she considers to be, “total BS,” adding that even the DSM doesn’t recognize it as an addiction.

She describes the years 2013-17 as her second “slump.” She divorced her partner in 2016 and also had a surgically induced menopause thanks to long-undiagnosed endometriosis. She says she now balances her sex life with a spiritual interest in Buddhism. Pema Chodrom’s When Things Fall Apart was “incredibly helpful” during the slump as was “re-introducing myself to myself,” ie developing a masturbation practice.

She laments that after all the work that sex radicals put in back in the ’80s and ’90s, “visibility has come with a backlash. If you’re queer and trans in America it’s a scary time.”

She is also no fan of the “abysmal sex ed” of today, which she says has an emphasis on disease and promotes abstinence as the answer.

The most common question she is asked today is the same as the one she was asked at the beginning of her career: “Am I normal?”

She wishes people took sex more seriously. “People take classes for golf. Why wouldn’t they want to do that for sex?”

She plans to do something about this following her recent Masters in public health from George Washington University. “I want to make change on a bigger scale.” She’ll be focusing on queer and trans health.

But all is not lost in terms of sex today. She mentions Janelle Monae’s new album The Age of Pleasure. “She’s going to places other artists aren’t willing to.”

And she’s back in the sexual saddle. She describes her current relationship status as, “Solo polyamorous. Which is polyamorous without a primary partner. There may be at least one person or more who is making me very, very happy at the moment. And I’m available.”

She still calls herself a “dyke,” although she sleeps with people of many gender identities. “Cis women, trans, non-binary, cis men, trans men. Give me your body, give me your boundaries, I can work with it.”

For her, “it’s about the energy that you co-create together.”

I go back to her concept of “unlocking” sexuality. Does she feel, as a 52-year-old post-menopausal woman, that she has anything more to unlock?

“Sounding,” she responds, referring to the practice of inserting stainless steel thin rods into the urethra. “I was doing it to someone,” she says excitedly. “I mean, the mad skills some people have!”

She’s on bio identical hormones and she admits, with a chuckle, that her vagina these days is “less wet and less hearty.” She adds, “I recently ran into a dick I couldn’t take. Was I sad? Sure. But it’s about reframing what sex and desire is.” One of her popular workshops is “Perimenopause, Menopause and Pleasure.”

“Sometimes you have to make adjustments. But all bodies are different. There are people in post-menopause getting penetrated with big things, who get fisted–I fisted them!”

She confides, “Things are exciting right now. I have found incredible lovers who are my contemporaries with whom I have explosive chemistry. All the wisdom. All the experience. Also I give no fucks. I have a belly. Let’s just deal with it.”

She laughs then stops as if something has just struck her.

“If someone had told me, You’re going to have the best sex of your life post-menopause in your fifties, I wouldn’t have believed them.”

It’s comforting to know that the wild ride continues.

A Part Of The Heart Can’t Be Eaten by Tristan Taormino is published on Sept. 5 by Duke University Press.