Archives Past ReEntry sites. Apply What grabs you? Schedule Upcoming ReEntry Editors This week's ReEntry editor is the founder and Editor of scarletletters.com, scarleteen.com and femmerotic.com. Her written work has appeared in numerous venues online and in print. Her work in sexuality information and activism has hailed accolades from The City Pages to Playboy, the Kinsey Institute the Illinois Library Association. She is also a model & performer, artist and designer, poet, musician, and a former kindergarten teacher. She lives in Minneapolis with an extensive zoo, a pug, and a stunning androgyne, and has performed the medical miracle of living for over 31 years on coffee, cigarettes and stubbornness. Meet... Heather Corinna

Exhibiting the following journals with one entry excerpt feels a bit like splitting a person in half. All of these journals belong to writers who work in sexuality and have radical sexual lives: a feminist pornographer, an adult site reviewer, two well-known erotica and sexuality authors and editors, a gay male pornographer, and a women's sexuality site operator. And all of us may appear in our entries to be two separate people if you aren't used to folks like us. One day an entry may be about shopping for fall clothes for the children, or a meditation, or world events; and the next day one may find a very hot and graphic account of sexual activates from the night before.

But you see, this is how we are: sex is as much a part of our life as any other part, and when sex is all or part of your living, it can take on as much ease and normalcy as grocery shopping.

I have found that some of the most honest, visceral daily writing out there happens within this group, likely because once you're used to talking honestly and without shame about sex in public, it's far easier to talk with candor about everything else. As you may or may not expect, some of the most honest, straightforward and least salacious writing about sex also happens in these journals. Sex writers do tend to talk about sex -- sometimes haunting, sometimes funny, sometimes so personal it hurts -- but not always.

So it is with the entry below from David K, who operates one of the most trafficked gay male sex sites on the Net.

"I value, too, the concept that it's important to embrace awareness and wakefulness and to make efforts in those directions -- and, hopefully, the ideas I share (and write from) embody a spirit of inquiry that impresses others, should they feel inclined, to do likewise. 'Waking up' implies not only shaking off the slumber that dulls and automates one's private life, but also cutting through the fog and stealth that hinders one's ability to see clearly the time and place they are living in. If the process of awakening is a series of steps, then the very first one that a person can embark upon is peering through political/religious veils. And doing this means discriminating what is false from what is true. It's futile to think there could be an absolute solution to the riddle of politics and religion (I mean, it's been asserted -- unsolved, repeatedly, in various garb, since time began -- study the Palestinian situation if you want to steep yourself until you drown), but it is the effort that counts. And that is tantamount to wakefulness."

Sexual politics are often at the forefront of the minds of sexuality workers. And often, when sexual politics are a topic of discourse, it is with an intimate knowledge, not just of one's own politics, but of the sexual experiences and ideologies of the readers, clients, or coworkers one hears from each day, as shown below in both Lydia (a lesbian pornographer), and Sabrina's (a women's sexuality site operator) entries, respectively.

"I want to find an understanding of my identity, of sexuality in general that draws a circle that includes those who have customarily excluded me. That, to me, is the most radical act imaginable. And it's a first giant step toward healing things that have nothing to do with what you or I or our neighbors down the street do together naked.

"I want to commit radical acts in service to radical goals. For instance, I need to listen to het women who don't do pain or domination talk about what they feel and what they want. I need to listen to het men. I need to listen to people who cringe at BDSM: They are not bigots, and it would be bigoted of me to mistake different tastes for oppression. I need to shut up and try to understand."

"Fascinating to note that American Heritage, in defining 'slut' as 'a sexually promiscuous woman; a slattern,' does not deem it offensive slang as it does dyke. I'm not sure if that's because American Heritage doesn't think there's anything wrong with being sexually promiscuous, or if they don't think there's anything wrong with calling a sexually promiscuous woman a slut, but there you have it.

"Although I wouldn't call myself sexually promiscuous (I've had only one partner for the past five years), I am absolutely fine with my status as a slatternly woman."

Because in our work we often deal with the integration of body and mind, the flesh itself is a common recurring theme, approached with realism and a poignant earnestness, as in erotica author Debra Hyde's entry here:

"My body's almost a decade older and two children wiser than [Marilyn] Monroe's was, so I have bit of a belly and more sag in the flesh than I care to detail, but, essentially, my figure isn't all that different than Monroe's was. It sure startled Tomboy me, who now figures she better do a major adjustment to that inner vision. I can't be androgynous in body, it turns out, only in mind.

"And I'm starting to understand why I sometimes attract attention.

"In fact, maybe that's what drove me towards androgyny? Maybe I find comfort there because it doesn't demand I be the breathy beauty, complete with affectation of a wholesome naivety while sex smolders beneath the surface. Maybe androgyny allows me to escape all things feminine for a safer ground that allows men in, but not by virtue of utterly feminine wiles."

And sometimes -- as is often the case of nearly any diarist -- the entries are pure sexual description. But when they are, as in the entry below from Peter Throckmorton, an adult site reviewer and a polyamorous top, you'll find some of the most natural, fluid, cohesive and diverse writing to be found about sex on the web today.

"Saturday night Chloe asked me if I'd go into what she termed White Trash Wife Beater mode. I started to think on what sorts of things could go into a scene if I were living in a single-wide propped on tilting cinder blocks, failing the tooth-to-tattoo ratio, and aspiring to someday appear on the Jerry Springer show. Oh - and then she asked if I'd mind if she fought back. This isn't gonna be pretty, folks.

"I was wearing a pair of those too-blue cheapo blue jeans, white socks and black shoes, with a flannel shirt worn sleeveless and open like a vest, over an olive drab tank top that said PIG in nice bold letters across the chest. Backwards on my head was a dirty baseball cap from a 'Dunny's Drive In - Nooksack WA,' obviously a national cultural landmark. She was kicking and yelling and fighting and struggling and scratching and all that stuff, right from the git-go all the way through. The DMs had been warned, Georgette egged us on, Panther and family had helped distract her, and apparently we had a good sized audience. I guess that kinda added sterno to her flames when I got her secured to the wall kneeled down to sort through my toy bag ... and pulled out a bag of fried pork rinds to sit and munch on. Good lord, but that girl got steamed."

More often than not, what you find at diaries like ours is a bit of all the above: what we know and learn about sexuality each day, both personally and professionally, and the subtle (or blatantly obvious) ways it colors the way we view and experience the world in our daily lives. How everything becomes integrated. In my opinion, that is what makes these journals so fantastic and so multifaceted: the integration of body and mind, of work, of love, lust and plain old daily living that may take a bit of getting used to for those outside our experiences, but which offers a vantage point which is unique and a pleasure to read, and which often bypasses the seeming strangeness of what we do for a living. Sometimes, our work speaks best for itself of all this. In a voice that is ours and not ours, and perhaps, most universal, it speaks on its own, as it did for my business partner and the brilliant erotica and sexuality author Hanne Blank in the voice of her muse in this entry.

"I am pleased when you find me still penetrating your flesh, I am satisfied to remain undisturbed by your impulsive hands. And we are both satisfied when I curl up to dream and you remember again -- and always as if for the first time -- that that this is why you bother, why you keep close to your pen, why I let you rail at me, why you let me into your clean-floored rooms with my filthy boots, why you let me probe your softest hidden parts with my philandering Damascus-steel tongue, why you don't change the sheets when they're rank with our rut.

"You know my breath is sweeter than white peaches. You know that the sweat you lick from the fur of my belly is the antidote to all the slow poisons they try to use against you. You are a woman in love, and it is maddening, dissonant, but constant as the moon. That's why you do this. Because that's enough."