So, the amazingly cool event of last week? I got an email from someone saying she liked my columns. I do get some of those kinds of emails from people I’ve never met, and it’s always extremely nice to hear. But this was a bit different.

It was from Susie Bright.

Yeah, Susie fucking Bright! I’m not kidding.

Now, some of ya’ll may actually not know who Susie Bright is, and I feel sorry for you. You should immediately go subscribe to her blog and buy all her books, and then you’ll understand. Only you won’t really understand, unless like me, you were once a lonely, isolated teenager in a small, sex-negative Southern town, before the internet existed, and writers like Ms. Bright were the only, only hope you had in the world that somewhere, there were other people like you. Let me snip from Wiki here:

Susie Bright co-founded and edited the first women's sex magazine, On Our Backs, "entertainment for the adventurous lesbian," from 1984 to 1991. She founded the first women's erotica book series, Herotica and edited the first three volumes. She started The Best American Erotica series in 1993, which is still being published. She was the choreographer/consultant for the Wachowski Brothers film, Bound (in which she also had a cameo appearance). Bright also appeared as herself in an episode of the HBO series Six Feet Under.
Bright taught the first university class on the subject of the aesthetics and politics of pornography at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California in 1986, and became well-known for her scholarship in sexual representation through her courses on the subject at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Bright was the first female critic of the X-Rated Critics Organization in 1986, and wrote feminist reviews of erotic films for Penthouse Forum from 1986-1989. Her film reviews of mainstream movies are widely published, and her comments on gay film history are featured in the documentary film The Celluloid Closet.

Yeah. So, as you may infer, me getting a note from Susie Bright is like a parish priest getting a note from the Pope saying, “Hey kid, nice Mass.” I know I'm gushing like a schoolgirl here, but truly, this was A Big Deal to me. I would not be the writer that I am without people like Susie Bright, and she was a huge influence on me as a budding young kinky and not-heterosexual woman. I just hope I can do as much for other people as she did for me.