Please join us for an in-person event with Tristan Taormino celebrating the release of A Part of the Heart Can't Be Eaten. For this event, Tristan will be joined in conversation by Heather Corrina.
Please note: Pre-registration for this event is required. By pre-registering, you are verifying that you are fully vaccinated and will wear a mask throughout the entirety of the event.
In A Part of the Heart Can't Be Eaten, award-winning author, sex educator, filmmaker, and podcast host Tristan Taormino shares her coming-of-age story, revealing how her radical sexuality and unconventional career grew out of an extraordinary queer father-daughter relationship. Raised by a hard-working single mother on Long Island, Tristan got her sex ed from the 1980s TV show Solid Gold and The Joy of Sex. She spent summers at drag shows in Provincetown with her father, Bill, who had come out as gay in the mid-1970s. Her sexual identity bloomed during her college years at Wesleyan University, where she discovered her desire for butches and kinky sex.
Tristan's world began to fall apart when her dad was diagnosed with AIDS. After a series of devastating events, she moved to the messy, glorious world of 1990s New York City. In the midst of grief and depression, she helped change queer sexual subculture with her zine Pucker Up, her infamous The Village Voice column, and her editorship of legendary lesbian porn magazine On Our Backs. After the publication of her first book, The Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex for Women, Tristan followed her own path that marked the beginning of her work as a trailblazing feminist pornographer.
After a lifetime of outrageous adventures, Tristan reflects on the bonds, loss, and mental-health struggles that shaped her. She weaves together history from her father's unpublished memoir, exploring the surprising ways their personal patterns converge and diverge. Bracingly emotional and erotically charged, A Part of the Heart Can't Be Eaten reveals the transformative power of queer pleasure and defiance.
Tristan Taormino is a writer, speaker, sex educator, and host of the podcast Sex Out Loud. A former syndicated columnist for The Village Voice, she is the author of numerous books, including Opening Up: A Guide to Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships and The Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex for Women. She is the founding editor of the annual Best Lesbian Erotica anthologies, editor of The Ultimate Guide to Kink, and coeditor of The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure.
Heather Corinna is a queer and nonbinary feminist author, educator, activist, artist, organizer and innovator. They’re the founder of Scarleteen, the first comprehensive sex, sexuality and relationships education online resource and direct services provider for young people of its kind, now entering its 25th year. They’re also the author of S.E.X: The All-You-Need-To-Know Sexuality Guide to Get You Through Your Teens and Twenties, Wait, What?: A Comic Book Guide to Relationships, Bodies, and Growing Up with Isabella Rotman, and What Fresh Hell Is This? Perimenopause, Menopause, Other Indignities and You.
Accessibility: This event is hosted in-store, which is an accessible space. Seating is first-come, first-serve. Masks are required. To request ASL interpretation, please email events@womenandchildrenfirst.com at least 14 days before the event. For questions or access needs, please email events@womenandchildrenfirst.com.
