Sex Q&A: Poet Jessica Holter pens erotic novel

Jessica Holter is known as a Punnany Poet. You’ve seen her on HBO’s Real Sex and in Charlotte at the Charlotte Literary Festival in 2007.

Now Holter is back with her first fictional novel, which takes a look at gender roles and sexuality like no other book has done. In The Punany Experience, Holter tackles sexual identity, pleasure and STDs without preaching or getting political; however, if you don’t find a message in the pages of this fiction, then you’ve missed the biggest part of the experience.

Here’s a brief look at what the book is about:

Take an unhappy husband with a spoiled and suspicious wife, an androgynous businesswoman with a knack for inflicting pain, an executive assistant with no shame, then add a passive-aggressive lesbian pillow princess to the scene and you have just started The War Between Tops and Bottoms.

Holter spoke with Creative Loafing about the book, which was released on July 6.

Creative Loafing:<!–em>Why did you decide to write a novel?

Jessica Holter: Well, I just kind of write whatever. My background isn’t in poetry; my background is in journalism. When my first book came out, Verbal Penetration, which was a poetry book, I pretty much put some of my more famous pieces in there. Pieces that people knew from Real Sex. I had this book on my heart to write and I figured I’d just take the time to write it. It didn’t really take that long to write — just a few months away from my friends and family in D.C.

It’s a very real topic and it’s one that hasn’t been touched upon. And it puts a little manhood back into men after so many “down low” books have come out. The male in this book is not a gay man. He’s just a man, like many other men, who is in tuned or trying to become in tuned with his own G-spot — which is his prostate. That is a conversation that you will see in the near future to be talked about more.

Your characters read real, not stereotypical at all. How did you create them?

I really did not go into this trying to do anything in particular, except trying to tell an interesting story. I wasn’t politically led until after I was done and I read it and realized what had come out of me. I guess that’s just the poet in me. Poets tend to write from a position of passion, and I think for me, I was writing out of passion. I want women to know that men have a special button in their ass — they have a clit in their ass. If we send our men to jail, the community sends them to jail. Most men are having sex of some sort in jail. Most men can’t go a week without some sort of sex. I think that they’ve just been exposed to the fact that they have this thing and when they get out, our culture doesn’t support them exploring it. That’s how you get the down low. I have definitely tried to take the sting out of that as far as this discussion about what is gay. I tried to tear down the barriers of what sexual identity is.

More from Jessica Holter:

This article appears in Jul 6-12, 2010.