Dixie De La Tour wants you to talk about sex, for the sake of San Francisco's reputation. “I am still baffled at how a city as cosmopolitan as SF could not realize that perverts tell the very best stories,” says the host of Bawdy Storytelling. That's why she started the pervy monthly event that gathers up our city's sex-positive to share their most tawdry tales of love and lust. Recent Bawdy themes have included cheap sex, public sex, cockblocking, and December's “Dick in a Box” night (holiday sex!) Usually held at the Mission's Blue Macaw, the five-year anniversary edition of Bawdy will occupy the stage of the Verdi Club on Sat/18.
We asked De La Tour to recount five of her favorites Bawdy stories in honor of the event's milestone, which she did happily, including this scene-setting by way of introduction:<!--break-->
My career as a sexuality-based raconteur started innocently enough: about six years ago, a friend invited me to hear him tell a story in a café in the avenues…a story from his life, told to friends and strangers. While other cities have events like the Moth, we don’t, and I didn’t understand what I was going to see, but I ended up loving it. I was immediately hooked: all the stories were true, the person who stood in front of me was telling me a story from their life and how they’d made it happen…it seemed like the Ultimate Insider Guide, a roadmap to finding like minds and the way to create that unlisted San Francisco adventure. I saw immediately that storytelling was a way to find your people.
Except for one thing: My stories were about the underground sex scene… dungeons and sex parties, Craigslist hook-ups. With so many years as a sex event ‘party starter’ (my real superpower), there was not a single story I could share with these storytelling people without using the f-word. The event’s leader suggested I just shy away from profanity and allude to the sex in the story, but I balked: Sex is not an aside, sir; sex is the point of the story.
So five years ago this month, my life took an interesting turn and I became a Sex and Storytelling show producer. Had anybody else ever seen fit to fill this niche, I would not be doing this today (and how glad I am that they didn’t: I truly love creating Bawdy Storytelling). I am still baffled at how a city as cosmopolitan as San Francisco could not realize that perverts tell the very best stories, but it just takes experiencing it once for many people to realize just how essential these stories are. Sex-related storytelling guarantees interesting true tales, and while Donna Reed is standing onstage recounting an awkward attempt to get laid or figuring out she likes girls after all, you’re ticking off factoids in the back of your head: How to find a sex party? Check. How to write a personal ad that can land you in a threesome? Check. Why a dildo needs to be flanged? Ahhh… got it.
I truly believe storytelling is the antidote to loneliness and social anxiety - it may sound counterintuitive, but talking about sex is easier than talking about climbing Kilimanjaro; you know the listener is hanging on your every word when you’re talking about sex. So how’s about we all figure out this shit together?
CURTIS
For his 50th birthday, Curtis' wife surprised him with a trip to Vegas and asked him to tell her his secret fantasy, the one he’d never dared to share. He told her he’d always wanted to have sex with a transgendered sex worker, and they invited Maria to our hotel and shared a night with her. She liked them and stayed after to talk and at one point she told them that at 14, she’d confessed to her mother she wanted to live her life as a woman. She then showed them the scars: six deep stab marks where her mother had tried to kill her. Curtis raised a toast and said they should all live our own lives as who and what we want to be, and asked them to drink to Maria’s bravery and self-knowledge. (There was not a dry eye in the house.)
SAHRA
Sahra was raised Mormon and expected to wait till marriage for sex, but at 18 she decided to lose her virginity to a guy she was dating. The same week they broke up, her parents found out and put her out on the street, so she called an older gentleman she knew who had a room for rent. Over dinner, he hit on her and when she got back to his house, he brought out a strap-on, a dominatrix outfit and other accoutrements and talked her through using them. She’d never even seen porn and had no idea what she was doing, but in one night she went from sexually inexperienced (she’d had sex three times, missionary position, period) to performing sexual acts that most people have never heard of. In the three years she lived there, she never slept in that room for rent; they repeated those acts for years and she later married him. [Dixie's note: The reason I love this story is that Sahra had been coming to the show for 6 months, all the while thinking she had no stories of her own worth telling onstage. How wrong she was!]
CATIE
Catie wanted to go to an all-girl sex party, but didn’t want to go alone so she asked someone she barely knew to attend with her. While talking about not knowing what they were looking for, they were approached by a woman and presented to three pro-dommes, out for a good time on a Saturday night. They bound them, spanked them, used them sexually, and when she wasn’t experiencing pleasure she was watching my partner-in-crime’s pleasure – until they fisted her, and Catie thought “I could never do that!’ When debriefing later at home, Catie told her this and her friend side-eyed her… Catie had been fisted, her friend insisted. She later tried to find those professional dominants to see if it were true. You’d think you’d know if you were fisted, right? Sometimes, you just don’t know.
MOLLENA
A handsome young blond man couldn’t stop staring at Mollena, and they ended up going out on a date. Later in bed during sex, he reached around her and grabbed her belly fat. She was appalled; grabbing her ass, she reasoned, was fine, but not her stomach! After he did it repeatedly, she yelled at him to stop and he replied, “I like it. Shut up.” She quickly learned that she was tiny compared to the type of big black women he lusted after…In fact, he liked her extra pounds so much that eventually, she came to like them, too. If you aren’t born loving your body, find somebody who does and let them pass along a little secondhand appreciation for what you’re packing. It’s not the ideal way to find acceptance, but is anything ideal, really?
The final story is one that occurred offstage:
JENNIFER
My husband and I go to Bawdy Storytelling every month, and one night we came home after the show, I sat him on the edge of the bed and announced a final storyteller that night: me. A year before, they’d gone to Burning Man and had given each other a hall pass to do anything without penalty, and then had come home with an unspoken “don’t ask don’t tell” policy in place. After hearing the true stories onstage that night, she felt compelled to tell him about the young cowboy she’d spent the week with and the adventurous “hell, we don’t know each other, so let’s live out our every fantasy together” non-stop sex they’d enjoyed. Her husband sat quietly and then announced “now THAT was the best story all night,” and he told her about his own hall pass adventures. After a year of being with each other every day, it took an evening out gave them the right place to tell each other everything.
Five Hard[core] Years of Bawdy
Sat/18 7 p.m., $15 presale
Verdi Club
2424 Mariposa, SF