My mum wrote a porno

A friend once asked me what it’s like to have liberal parents. She grew up in the country, in a churchgoing family who – by way of recreation – engaged in various sports that involve hitting things with sticks. I grew up in a house where, at any given time, someone in the family was either naked or screaming, or both. The only taboo, if you can even call it that, was that me or one of my siblings might grow up to be a Tory voting mortgage broker

But I still didn’t know what to say to my friend. It was like she’d asked a mole to describe darkness. My upbringing just was, and I’ve never known any different. Then I remembered something: the time one of my uni housemates discovered my mum writes erotic novels, proceeded to order one on Amazon and read out a sex scene – aloud – in the living room, in front of my other housemates. Now, there are liberal parents, and then there are parents who write things for people to masturbate to. In my damp, grotty student house, listening to my friend reel off my mum’s homemade smut, I realised that. I should probably add, at this point, that my dad is the author of a book called O: An Intimate History Of The Orgasm. A copy of which, a school friend of mine insisted on having him sign for her.

But, I’m afraid (and maybe a little bit proud) to say that even that – even my mum writing erotica – is another thing that just felt normal. That was until she, in honour of my recent coming out, decided to put a lesbian character in one of her novels. When I was done feeling touched that my mum was diversifying one of her creations to reflect the experience of me, her youngest daughter, I had a question.

“Does she have sex?” I asked, the mild horror of the situation beginning to outweigh the mild beauty. “No,” she said. “She’s the heroine’s sister. It wouldn’t quite work if I made her sex life a thing.” “Oh,” I said, relieved, but maybe – deep, deep down in the basement of my subconscious – a little disappointed.

“But what if she were the heroine?” I said. “The lesbian character… do you think you could write the sex?” “Yeah, why not?” she said, in a sort of vocal shrug very particular to my mum. “Well,” I began, but I had no idea where I was going. Did I want my mum to be cool enough to write a lesbian sex scene, or did her lack of experience in that area make the idea both gross and a little bit offensive?

“I’m not sure you could write lesbian sex,” I said, by way of a conclusion. “Of course I could,” she said. “I’d just use my imagination. It’s not hard. Why does your generation think it invented sex?” “But it wouldn’t seem real,” I said, beginning to come down quite hard on the side of “straight people can’t and shouldn’t write gay sex”. Which is strange, seeing as it’s equally infuriating when straight people ask lesbian couples, “So, what do you guys actually do?”

The judgement we eventually reached was that people who don’t know what lesbians “do” must have grindingly boring sex lives. This is not a conclusion I ever thought I’d reach with – of all the people in the known universe – my mother, as liberal and sex-positive as she may be. Or maybe this exchange with the woman who, throughout my teens, would announce at regular intervals that intercourse is “overrated” and the best kind of sex is “outercourse”, was only to be expected.

Whether or not straight people are capable of writing true to life gay sex, maybe it’s (sometimes…) the thought that counts. And, as my mum says, “Stuff is stuff.” She means “sex stuff”.