Sinister Wisdom: We Teach Sex (To Everyone)
Call for Submissions

We--lesbians, queer women, nonbinary, and trans folks--teach sex education in official capacities, like classrooms, and in unofficial ones, like at bus stops and in basements. We teach sex to each other, in our own communities, and to others, outside our communities, as sex workers, sex educators, pleasure activists, pleasure coaches, sexperts, and sex novices alike.

Rather than how-to tutorials, this call seeks the stories of how we teach and learn about bodies and sex. As technology forces us to rethink the way we teach, learn, and consume information, it also challenges us to consider the idea of community through remoteness.

Finally, in a media landscape that still showcases the trauma of queer folks over their daily lives, we ask you to send us your love letters, your tales of triumph, and your poems about sexy resilience and resourcefulness.

We welcome queer identities of all stripes in this call.

Examples of what we’re looking for: creative writing about teaching your queer friends how to get themselves off, art about reclaiming sexuality through education/empowerment, stories of how the sex work hustle taught you more about your own sexuality (and taught you to teach others, too), etc etc.

Please submit fiction, non-fiction, poetry, interviews, and genre-non-specific work, up to 5k words, and a short contributor biography, between 25 and 125 words.

We are also seeking illustration and photographs, (.jpg or .tif files only, print resolution size at least 300 ppi).

Please do not send previously published work.

We STRONGLY prefer that you submit your work through Submittable, our online submission management system. Using Submittable ensures that both of our editors have an opportunity to see and consider your work and helps us ensure a timely response to your submission. If you CANNOT use Submittable for some reason (you are incarcerated, for instance, or you do not have internet access), please submit to LesbiansWhoTeach@gmail.com

Questions about submissions? Please email LesbiansWhoTeach@gmail.com
Submission Deadline: Wednesday, September 22, 2021. The anticipated publication date for this issue is in 2023.

Guest Editors:
July Westhale is a nonbinary queer femme dyke. July is also an essayist, translator, and the award-winning author of Trailer Trash, and Via Negativa, which Publishers Weekly called "stunning" in a starred review. Her most recent work can be found in McSweeney’s, The National Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, CALYX, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and The Huffington Post, among others. She also has an inventively-named collection of salty chapbooks. When she’s not teaching, she works as a co-founding editor of PULP Magazine, a sex and sexuality justice media company dedicated to changing the world. www.julywesthale.com

Kristy Lin Billuni is a bisexual dyke, a writer of sexy, triumphant stories, and teacher of bold, free, turned-on writers. She has aroused thousands of writers in her day job as The Sexy Grammarian and has roots in the sex industry and queer political activism. A handful of theaters, community spaces, and cabaret stages, most recently The Eagle NYC, have produced her short plays. Her fiction and essays appear in several anthologies and journals, most prestigiously, Sinister Wisdom. She and her public-health-hero wife live in San Francisco. www.sexyg.co/portfolio

Sinister Wisdom publishes work by Lesbians. Sinister Wisdom takes the definition of lesbian from Cheryl Clarke. In her influential essay, "Lesbianism: An Act of Resistance" Clarke writes, "I, for one, identify a woman as a lesbian who says she is. Lesbianism is a recognition, an awakening, a reawakening of our passion for each (woman) other (woman) and for same (woman)." We are interested particularly in work that reflects the diversity of our experiences: as lesbians of color, multiracial lesbians, ethnic lesbians, Jewish lesbians, Arab lesbians, old lesbians, young lesbians, working class lesbians, poverty class lesbians, gender queer lesbians, butch lesbians, masculine of center lesbians, androgynous lesbians, femme lesbians, trans lesbians, disabled lesbians, and fat Lesbians. We welcome experimental work and will not print anything that is oppressive or demeaning to lesbians or women, or that perpetuates stereotypes. Sinister Wisdom keeps an open and critical dialogue on all the issues that affect our lives, joy, and survival. http://www.sinisterwisdom.org/