Even someone standing outside, looking through the store window, would have been able to tell that this reading was unusual. It was not the kind of crowd that usually turns up at readings. And there was something patently botchy and demented about the center of attention. She had knotty, garishly streaked hair and wore a patchwork of pink leopard-print and tattered fishnet, a yellow belt, leg warmers, yellow heels, and the disgusted expression you’d imagine on someone who’s just swallowed something foul. She was not beautiful. The crowd was captivated. As she read, someone in the front row smiled, and then grimaced, and then looked confused, and then smiled. When she got to a line about someone’s ass being “the delicate entrance to his body,” the crowd lost it.
This was Ursula Android, the stern, dissipated drag queen of otherworldly stature, and the delicate entrance in question belonged to one Captain Kirk. Ursula found the story, “The Edge,” by Jungle Kitty, on the Internet, and described it as belonging to “the sub-literary genre of erotic fiction based on Star Trek characters.” The story is full of sentences like, “Momentarily startled by this impassioned ambush, Spock pulled away, but Kirk held his lover close, clutching his buttocks roughly, knowing he would leave bruises, determined to leave bruises” and, “Kirk gasped in painful astonishment and found his wrists were imprisoned by the steel of Vulcan hands, crushing them against the hard, cold mirror.” Spock says to Kirk, “If I were ever to… fuck you the way I want to, there would be no going back,” and Kirk, captivated by his subordinate’s brute power, lets the Vulcan inside him. At the story’s climax–which Ursula delivered while kicking her feet and pounding the table–Spock unties Kirk’s hands, throws Kirk onto his back, and spreads apart his legs. “Even a gentle entrance would be painful,” Ursula read. “And Spock had no intention of making a gentle entrance.”
The end of the story was also the end of this fall reading series, which has taken place once a month at Bailey/Coy Books since September. (It’s sponsored by The Stranger‘s Lovelab.) This event, “Queens on the Moon,” also featured Jackie Hell (who has vomit-colored pants, a gold boa, and a lumpy back) reading a science-fiction story for children, and a woman in purple reading from The Mists of Avalon, and Bailey/Coy owner Michael Wells reading from a story about a pageant of freaks. The whole reading series has been a kind of freak pageant (at the previous event in the series, Dina Martina read from Bill Clinton’s memoir, brilliantly mispronouncing a phrase of Clinton’s about a “rapt” audience as “raped” audience) and the good news, for fans of these events (and there are many), is that Bailey/Coy plans to host more in the new year. In January, a bunch of fat girls are going to read diet books–which, according to Wells, was Sarah Rudinoff’s idea.
