Year In Review On Sugarbutch: 2010

Another year is coming to a close, and aside from reflecting on my life personally, I’m reflecting on the accomplishments. I did a Year In Review On Sugarbutch for 2009 and I like it, it feels like a nice wrap-up of some of the accomplishments of that year, so I’m going to try to do this again.

To get started, here are the most popular posts on Sugarbutch during 2010:

1. Desperation & Dominance
2. Lipstick Blow Job
3. Waking Up
4. Nominations Needed for Top Hot Butches
5. Sweat & Summer
6. Gabrielle, Guest Star
7. Best Anal Scenes in Queer Porn
8. On Making Sex Last: Cheerleading & Open Relationships
9. Occasional Effects of D/s
10. The Relaunch of Top Hot Butches

Clearly most of these are smut stories, ya pervs. Two of the posts are about the relaunch of the Top Hot Butches project, which is now Butch Lab. And then there are a few random others, the anal sex scenes post is a nice representation of that anal week (that turned into anal month) exploration I did in early 2010.

Remember when I used to do monthly roundups? I still kind of miss that, but I can’t seem to make time for it. It was a really nice look back at the last month and what has happened here, which also told me what else I should focus on in the coming month. It made it easier to do these year-end roundups, too. So I’ve been going back through and making some notes about the year.

So, what happened.

I dated Kristen the whole year. She moved in with me in September, and we celebrated our second anniversary in December. We did manage to have a couple threesomes this year, one of which I wrote about in Gabrielle, Guest Star.

At the end of 2009, Kristen and I started exploring heavier D/s, and we still are, though I haven’t been writing about it as much. My public appearances have picked up tremendously (more about that later) and it’s been harder to put all of this in public. So I wrote a lot more password protected posts this year, and 2010 kicked off with three big ones in January: Occasional Effects of D/s, then a piece about D/s “homework” and why I was taking a break with it, and a piece about articulating what I need when I need it, which, though it sounds simple, is probably one of those life skills we all have to learn and re-learn and re-learn, something that hopefully gets easier but is never easy.

The good news is, late in 2010 I finally got the password/mailing list working, so I don’t have to do that manually anymore. If you want the password, I’ll trade you for adding your email address to my mailing list, where I (try to) send out updates on my work once a month.

Events:

February kicked off my year of travel, and boy, did I travel. After I got a booking company, PhinLi, last year, I have been doing more and more public events. I went to KinkForAll Providence in Rhode Island, Brown University in Providence, SXSW in Austin, Texas, Drew University in New Jersey, Tuscon Arizona for a strap-on workshop, Portland Oregon for a Strap-On workshop and a second time for the Butch Voices regional conference, Seattle for the Sex 2.0 Conference, Seattle and Southeast Alaska for Kristen to visit where I grew up, Albuquerque for an erotic energy retreat, The 2nd Annual CSPH Conference in Pawtucket, RI, and Northampton MA to visit Smith University. Am I missing any? I think that was it. Aside from that, I also did quite a few workshops in New York City, including at the Lesbian Sex Mafia, cunnilingus class at Purple Passion, Conversio Virium, Columbia University’s BDSM student group, and NYU for Trans Week.

The national Femme Conference was held in 2010, as well as regional Butch Voices Conferences in Portland, LA, and New York City. I was on the committee for the Butch Voices NYC Regional Conference which happened in September, which was a huge success. Some of the pieces I wrote up were: What’s going on at the BV NYC Conference?, the conference starts today!, BV NYC is over … … but BV Portland is this weekend. Syd London took photos. I did a countdown to the national Femme Conference that happened this year in August in Oakland, too, by mentioning and reviewing some of my favorite books about femme identity.

I started hosting regular porn parties on Twitter, starting with Fluid. We also watched Tight Places: A Drop Of Color (which was so good) and four episodes of the Crash Pad Series. I also hosted Butch Brunch a few different times, mostly in leading up to the Butch Voices Conference in New York City, but I’m interested to do a bit more of that. It’s fun to get together and talk about gender (go figure).

I launched Sideshow: The Queer Literary Carnival in April, a reading series I am co-producing and co-hosting with my good friend Cheryl B. Syd London took some amazing promotional shots of me & Cheryl for Sideshow’s materials, and we launched queerliterarycarnival.com after running it for a few months. We even have an intern, as of December! (More on him soon.)

Cheryl launched her own new project in 2010, WTF Cancer Diaries, after being diagnosed with hodgkins lymphoma. And perhaps as a nice counter, if you need a pick-me-up, my girlfriend Kristen started a Butches With Cute Animals tumblr. Submit your photo!

Perhaps the biggest project of my year was the relaunch of the Top Hot Butches project, which is now Butch Lab. I also put a call out for nominations and the “list” is now more of an unordered, unnumbered database, and the site is more community-based and includes a blog and a monthly writing prompt carnival called Symposium. I wrote a piece about being butch enough.

Publications:

Early in February 2010 I started a weekly column with SexIs Magazine called Mr. Sexsmith’s Other Girlfriend. I kept writing columns for CarnalNation.com until they closed in the fall. I’d love to find another place to house my Radical Masculinity column, but haven’t yet. I’ve written there basically weekly since then, with a few weeks off. I’ve also written pieces for AfterEllen and the Lambda Literary Foundation this year, and I am writing a quarterly roundup of lesbian erotica on LambdaLiterary.org, two of which were published in 2010, in the fall and in the winter.

If you’d like to follow the pieces I write elsewhere, you can follow to the blog over on mrsexsmith.com online or by RSS.

In books, I have pieces in Sometimes She Lets Me: Best Butch/Femme Erotica and Best Lesbian Erotica 2011. Stories of mine were accepted to Gotta Have It: 60 Stories of Sudden Sex and Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme, but I haven’t seen copies of either of those yet. Persistence is due out in the spring or summer of 2011, I’m not sure exactly when.

The big news for publications, though, is the BDSM lesbian erotica anthology I am editing for Cleis Press! Deadline for submissions is January 1st 2011, and it is due out in the fall. I’ve had some amazing submissions so far, but there are still a few more days and I haven’t read everything. I’m really excited to be editing an anthology, and I’ve had some fantastic submissions so far.

Reviews & Affiliates:

I wrote a ton of reviews in 2010. In fact, in looking back over the archives, sometimes the reviews were completely dominating any other types of posts. I’m sure you can understand it is really fun to get sex toys in the mail. And it’s hard to turn them down when they are so generously offered. But … I have an overflowing toy box. I have most of the toys I’ve wanted, and I’m being a lot more discerning about what I review and what I take into my (not so spacious) apartment. I haven’t completely stopped doing reviews, though I hope you’ve noticed that there are significantly fewer posts about products than there used to be.

I’m trying to review more books than I used to, so I introduced Friday Reads. I’m trying to feature a queer or gender or sexy book on Fridays, though it doesn’t seem to be every Friday so far. So it goes! But one of my own personal goals is to read more books, so this is a good way to do that.

I added quite a few affiliates in 2010, including my own store at the Stockroom, Early 2 Bed in Chicago, and Cocksexual (because everyone can have fun with cocks), as well as affiliations with the new sites Heavenly Spire and QueerPorn.TV.

Awards:

You all voted Sugarbutch as the Best Sex/Short Story/Erotica site for the Lezzy Awards for the second year in a row! And I was included on the Best Sex Bloggers list at #27.

Last but not least, after that roundup, here’s some of my favorite pieces from the year that weren’t top viewers but are worth reading, and told the story of what was going on for me.

• Consent Obsession
• How Do I Let Go of a Past Hurt?
• The Sugarbutch Birthday Tradition of posting sexy shoes. Preferably strappy sandals, since that’s what really does it for me. I’m not sure why exactly.
• Following Up: What’s Next? Queer Activism in the South
• Anal Week Starts Today (check the anal week tag for all the posts)
• There’s A Reason Why Sex Education is Radical about the controversy in Rhode Island which started after the KinkForAll conference
• Happy 4th Anniversary, Sugarbutch, with the anniversary Sugarbutch tradition of ask me anything. I finally finished all the ask me anything questions in October. I like doing this, and I’ll probably do it again next year, but I have got to do it quicker. I had a few good write-ups from these questions, including From Not Stone to Stone-ish and Reconciling Feminism & Sadism.
• Kristen’s Birthday Project included birthday wishes from Jackie Strano, Jiz Lee, Syd Blakovich, and Dylan Ryan. Not sure how I’m going to top that next year, but I’ll try.
• I added a mentor series category, and wrote about Dan Savage, Rob Brezny, & Mary Oliver
• On Processing & Analyzing
• Get a Dominant to Dominate
• The Ongoing Quest to be Sexually Fulfilled
• It Gets Better. Also, Grief. Please #stayalive & The Bullying Continues tackle the teen suicides that shook up the US this past fall, the It Gets Better project, and quite a few resources, plus a discussion on what we should do to help this
• Protected: Stone: Occam’s Razor about my own stone identity
• Protected: So, What Happened? about relationship drama
• Ten Ways I Am A Gender Outlaw
• Protected: Responsibilities To Ourselves And Others was about mental health and our responsibilities to stay as sane as we can, to not hurt those we love around us. It was a hard piece, and hard comments, but I was glad to open the discussion.

There is still two more days to December, so perhaps I’ll get something else written and up. But if I don’t, then I hope this will keep you occupied while I take my break and write like mad in January.

Happy New Year, all.