My column, Blush, appeared monthly in XtraWest, Vancouver's Gay and Lesbian Biweekly for just over two years. When pitching the column, I said: “I propose a column in which Miss Cookie is the wise voice of social conduct in all things sexual. I expect to take samples from my real life to illustrate the do’s and don’ts.

I want, and have always wanted, to get people discussing the minutiae of sex— which means not just the details of the act, but the social world around the act— because it’s so damn important and healthy not to be squeamish.

We all do it, and yet often people are unwilling even to admit that they do. ‘Oh I don’t go to the bathhouses! or the peep shows! or the park!’ Or: ‘I don’t rim, felch, swallow cuz that’s gross.’

Well, they do.”

Sure, a bit high and mighty. The first few columns I wrote I surprised myself, noticing my own complicity in whatever nasty encounter I was describing. By the fourth column, I realized I had hit the meat of what I was doing. Confession, complicity, insight and, hopefully, self–knowledge.

Each month, I sat down to write with the same question in mind: What about my sex life do I not want anyone to know?

And that's what I wrote.

I gained a certain reputation in town for being super candid. Shameless. Cheap, maybe. Easy, certainly. People asked me if everything I wrote was true. “All except the outfits,” I answered.

Then there were the folks who got it, who didn't think I was an exhibitionist but a pro–sex advocate, a sex radical maybe. Radical for telling the truth. Radical for admitting my behaviours, my failings, my fears and my desires. I’m not sure which was more disheartening— those who thought I was a soulless exhibitionist or a world that needed to congratulate me for telling the truth.

As it is, I came to the end of the topics I wanted to talk about around the same time my publisher brought me in one too many times to complain I wasn’t writing the kind of column I’d agreed to. Seems I talked about serious sexual things, with humour, and he wanted the sexual and humour without the serious. So I quit.

Here is the product of those two years. The writing isn’t brilliant nor is it terrifically insightful, but it’s honest, and straight–forward, and, I hope, tackles a few subjects some of us might be happy to hear. You aren’t alone. It happened to me too, just like this...