Includes new work from Steven Elliot, Neal Pollack, Cris Mazza, Lori Selke, Matthue Roth, Susannah Breslin, Michael Hemmingson, Steven Burt, Kevin Sampsell, Gina Frangello, and Merri Lisa Johnson.

Also featuring p. 54 if any of you are missing it! Click here!

We live in a culture founded on transgressive desire (apple, serpent, party of five) even as it insists on suppressing it. What does it mean when our most sought-after emotional state--being beloved--comes into direct conflict with our most deeply ingrained values--being honest--in our most prized relationships? When desire is aroused, what are the consequences as it is silenced, suppressed, subverted, or fulfilled? And what happens next? Although recent estimates insist that half of all women and men have cheated in their relationships, the climate of silence surrounding such behavior (except in the lowest forms of popular culture and in conjunction with major public figures) would have us believe that affairs are an anomaly.

In a post-queer, post-nuclear family age, the "affair" looks different from media representations--that is to say, what's violated may not be the marital bond, and the betrayal may not be a sexual one. Homewrecker explores the emotional intensity and complexity that affairs entail: euphoric, unapologetic, guilty, torn, ashamed, unrepentant, creative, insatiable, self-loathing and many more--sometimes all at once, and from a multitude of perspectives. The anthology also examines what is destabilized by the affair--(heterosexual) pair bonding and the nuclear family--and the consequences on those who challenge it.
Major shapers of contemporary writing share space with fresh talent in Homewrecker, each with a different take on the desire and its aftermath. Steven Elliot remembers the dominatrix who two-timed him with a square while Lori Selke spins steamy erotica about just how quickly queer-marriage can degenerate into extra-marital queer activity. Neal Pollack recalls using the early days of the internet where anything seemed possible--even destroying the marriages of those you-ve never met--while Matthue Roth wonders if it-s possible to cheat on God. Cris Mazza, Susannah Breslin, Kevin Sampsell, and 19 other writers prove that there are no victims here, no villains, and no innocent bystanders. Only lovers, with all the responsibility the word implies.

Daphne Gottlieb is the author of three books of poetry: Final Girl (2003), Why Things Burn (2001), and Pelt (1999). She was the winner of the 2003 Audre Lorde Award for Poetry and a 2001 Firecracker Alternative Book Award. Daphne is the Poetry Editor for Other magazine and Lodestar Quarterly and her work frequently appears in journals and anthologies, including nerve.com, mcsweeneys.net, Red Light: Superheroes, Saints and Sluts, With a Rough Tongue, and Bullets and Butterflies. She lives in San Francisco, CA.

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Introduction

Let's just get this out in the open.
I was 14 when it happened the first time. He was 21. He made me suddenly, unaccustomedly beautiful with his kisses and mix tapes. During the year of elation and longing, he never mentioned that he had a girlfriend who lived across the street. A serious girl. A girl his age. A girl he loved. Unlike inappropriate, high school, secret me.
The next time, I was 15 and visiting a friend at college. It was a friend's friend's boyfriend who looked like Jim Morrison and wore leather pants and burned candles and incense. She was at work and I wanted him to touch me. She found out. I don't know what happened after that.
I was 19 and he was my boyfriend's archrival. I was 20 and it was my lover's girlfriend and we had to lie because otherwise he always wanted to watch. I was 24 and her girlfriend knew about it but then changed her mind about the open relationship. We saw each other anyway. I was 30 when we met - we wanted each other but were committed to other people; the way we look at each other still scorches the walls. I turned thirty-something and pointedly wasn't invited to a funeral/ a wedding/ a baby shower because of a rumor.
I am a few years older now and I know this: There are tastes of mouths I could not have lived without; there are times I've pretended it was just about the sex because I couldn't stand the way my heart was about to burst with happiness and awe and I couldn't be that vulnerable, not again, not with this one. That waiting to have someone's stolen seconds can burn you alive. That the shittiest thing you can do in the world is lie to someone you love; also that there are certain times you have no other choice; not honoring this fascination, this car crash of desire, is also a lie. That there is power in having someone risk everything for you. That there is nothing more frightening than being willing to take this freefall. That it is not as simple as we were always promised. Love - at least the pair-bonded, prescribed love - does not conquer all. It does not conquer desire.
Arrow, meet heart. Apple, meet Eve.
If it's an old story, it's an endlessly compelling one that we can't stop telling, in the headlines and on Jerry Springer, from politics to pornography. But if these conversations are happening out there in mass culture, they only occur in the quietest and most painful ways in our own homes. And there's no doubt these conversations are happening, even though statistics vary widely, from a marginal 15 percent to a whopping 80 percent of married couples cheating. Perhaps it's true in the public perception that, as a close single male friend said, "Monogamy is what you can get away with." But if there are so many people straying outside the lines, maybe it's time to examine how we really love - maybe then we'll be able to talk about adultery without snickering, whispering or screaming.
After Homewrecker's call for submissions went out, I received a number of fevered, upset emails. Over and over, they said: You're not in FAVOR of it, are you? I want to believe (but rather doubt) that this same question would be asked of me as the editor of an anthology on motherhood, cancer, or swing dance. But mothers, the ill, and dancers do not have to lie to nurture, heal, or perform. (On a side note, if cheating is as rampant as even the moderate statistics suggest, it strikes me as odd that we're still blaming the "homewrecker" rather than questioning the system. What would it look like if we prized honesty and love instead of pair fidelity?)
As a writer, I'm drawn to contradiction and cataclysm, compelled by ambivalent, tortured emotional states. As a feminist, I'm appalled that most of the acculturated stories we have about adultery end with the betraying, sinister woman being punished/cast out while adulterous men come back, transformed, renewed, rescued. As an American queer, I'm on the outside of the primary happily-ever-after story we tell about Love, and over and over, I'm struck by how hard-won this myth and its unlikely actualization are for anyone.
Here then, I hope, are stories, poems and essays about the way it really breaks down, about what desire does to us, about what happens when we're incandescent but are not allowed to be, about what we look like when we adore, and, in the end, what it cost.
Daphne Gottlieb
*
Except from "Making Adultery Work" by Merri Lisa Johnson
Sitting on the couch side by side, we face the bookshelf on the opposite wall of his office. Paul says something about our future, and I say something flippant and dismissive. He turns and asks earnestly, "So, you really think there's no way this can work?" I think about telling him the truth, the flat-out banal "of course not," and then decide against it. Instead I say, "Right now, sitting next to you, even though logically I am skeptical about our future, I feel that everything is possible and good." I feel warm inside this imagined space but also alone. I am lying and I know it. I know it will not turn out all right. I say it will anyway and blow hope into my hot tea.
I never told Paul this but the truth is, I picked him out as an adultery partner because I knew he was weak and troubled. I recognized that he was available the day he stood in my office doorway and announced that everyone liked his new hat except for his wife. We flirted over fundraising literature for juvenile diabetes. His son has it, and Paul has to check his blood sugar level ten times a day. The whole thing was textbook. Mostly, I just wanted to fuck. I fixated on him and played at having a crush, told my sister I missed him when I went away for a weekend. She said, "Be serious." "Why?," I wanted to know. "Feeling something pretend is more fun than feeling nothing at all." She didn't say anything else. I called Paul from my hotel room and announced that we should have an affair. He agreed.
I asked him about birth control. We hadn't even kissed yet. As I was leaving his office to go teach class, he stage whispered, "I love you." I stifled what I feared might be one of those off-note bird-squawk laughs. My eyes got wide. "I love you too."
We spend long hours in bed with my windows open and coffee cooling on the sills. He tells me the smell of my breath changes at the moment of penetration, and the observation cracks me open. He touches my hip bones, calls them "iliac crests" and imagines sculpting me, pushes his thumbs into the hollows of my hips and asks me over and over, "Have you ever felt this way before?" I hesitate, remembering how hard I pined after previous boyfriends. I tell him he doesn't get to ask questions like that as long as he is going home to his wife every night. "Have you ever felt this way before," he intones. I reason inwardly that the question is vague enough that I can answer without exactly lying or putting him above the other men I loved more truly and deeply. "No. I haven't."
Paul buys tickets for a mandolin concert in Asheville and asks if I want to go. We sit and listen to Tim O'Brien. I put the ticket stub to the Orange Peel in a bone-encrusted box like a fetish or a piece of evidence. I was here. We swayed in sync.
I don't really like kids, but once you're in your thirties you have to be nice about people's offspring, so when Paul calls to invite me to watch him play Frisbee with his son, I drive to campus and smile on the early spring grass. The campus pastor walks by. A student with a crush on Paul comes and sits with us. She chats him up and I stare across the field. What am I doing here? I tell myself I don't know.
The best parts of the affair are when we are apart, and I am riding in my car with the Charlotte radio station on. I picture myself in pink spandex and sing along with Lil' Kim about givin' niggaz deep throat. I am elated and outlaw. The music is loud and I don't give a fuck about family values or protecting the nuclear family or being honest or finding my own man. I think of Paul coming over at 5a.m., picture him bragging he'll have me up early in the mornin' moanin', even though we are awkward, at best, in bed. I climb inside these rap songs and leave mild reality behind. I am pure joy and leisure and pleasure. Irreverent. When Paul leaves to take his son to school, I stay in bed and climax until my stomach muscles hurt. Then I head to the backyard, book in hand, where I work on my tan with bluegrass blaring out my kitchen window. Our relationship is never very good, but it flips a switch in me and I permit myself to be playful and erotic. I watch TV topless and keep my legs shaved. Gillian Welch wails that she's gonna do it anyway, even if it doesn't pay, and I shake my head mm-hmm.