In her own words:

"Why do I write about sex? Because no one else has the balls to, I guess. Many times I have felt like a reluctant sexpert, or intimidated by the burden it takes to expose sexual dishonesty and illusions. Sex is the number one thing that people lie about, and I often feel it is inordinately threatening to say something simple and true.
Sexual expression is THE most repressed form of American speech. You can rail against capitalism in this country, you can tele-evangelize from a pulpit that only exists in your mind, you can be gross, gratuitously violent, and just plain insane, but in this country, you cannot say certain words in public because they are SEXUAL, you cannot look at certain pictures in public because they’re SEXUAL and you cannot articulate many ideas to the mainstream because their SEXUAL nature deems them inadmissible. For some reason SEX ideas are considered the most DANGEROUS, INFLAMMATORY ideas in our lives. It’s not just a matter of being 'polite' or 'private,' because we don’t put folks in jail just for being rude. Sex, however, is something people get prosecuted for. Promoting sexual truth is like throwing a bomb: In fact, we have more bomb-throwers in America than sexual liberators."

Susie Bright, aka Susie Sexpert, is an author, editor, performer, and educator. She has written six books and edited eleven anthologies. Her frank, intelligent, playful style delights and informs: “Susie Bright approaches sexuality with an openness and sense of humor that are disarming as they are radical.” ~ David Ulin, L. A. Reader.

Born March 25, 1958 in Arlington Va., Susie grew up in California and Canada. She was raised “in a lapsed Irish Catholic fashion” by her mother and spent two years in parochial school. By high school, she had become a left wing activist, writing for The Red Tide, her school’s underground newspaper, on such such subjects as narcs on campus and how to get free birth control.

She dropped out of high school, worked as an organizer for the Teamsters Union, and was

"first arrested, actually, on a UPS picket line, for telling a supervisor that he was a little prick. I was charged with disorderly conduct and condemned by a Michigan judge who called me a ‘menace to society’. I hope I’ve done him proud.”

Susie worked for five years at Good Vibrations, a women’s vibrator store in San Francisco, CA. She co-founded the magazine On Our Backs, “the first magazine by women about sex…the first openly lesbian magazine about anything… it featured the first erotic women’s photography ever published in a magazine.” She has written columns in the past for On Our Backs, Penthouse Forum, Playboy Online, Salon, and the San Francisco Review of Books. She currently produces and records a weekly internet audio show called ”In Bed with Susie Bright” (www.audible.com). She put in an appearance in the movie "The Celluloid Closet", and was also a sex consultant for the movie “Bound,” where she had a cameo appearance as a bar girl who speaks (briefly) with Gina Gershon’s character.

Susie is bisexual, and has had (among other experiences) “long term relationships with one lover at a time, sometimes a woman, sometimes a man.” She has a daughter, Aretha*, born in 1989, and has been with her current partner, Jon, for over a decade.

Again, Susie in her own words:

"I was naïve enough to talk about sex honestly when I was young, and it had such a profound affect on people around me that I decided never to stop…
I am hopeful; my books are hopeful and subversive at the same time.
Sexual freedom and knowledge are priceless, the creative and evolutionary tools that some think we just happen to be sitting on, but which in fact offer us a much bigger vision above the neck, if we’d care to give them a chance."

Check out Susie’s stuff:

Susie Bright on books and sex: (originally a node created by knifegirl, 11/14/99)

"I used to be embarrassed that my sex knowledge came more from books than from experience, but by the time my experience caught up with my library, I realized that a great book was on a par with a great fuck, without disrespect to the lessons learned from either."

* “I’m expecting. My very own bundle of joy is due in a blaze of Gemini glory on June twelfth. My first child is on its way… Tell you what, I’ll break the ice. My friend Hashima put it to me at a Christmas party: ‘did you inseminate… or did you party?’ I started laughing, and she winked. ‘Yeah, you partied.’” (Susie Sexpert's Lesbian Sex World, pages 151-153)

Sources:

Quotations by Susie and about her life are from www.susiebright.com., which features news, message board, reviews, stories, photo gallery, tour schedule, book/video/audio store, biography, and FAQ

See also: www.salon.com/march97/interview970318.html And www.sccs.swarthmore.edu/users/99/maya/susie.html

Log in or register to write something here or to contact authors.