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‘Soft Core’ Takes Readers on a Delirious Ride Through SF’s Kinky Underground

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On the left, a book cover that features a hand in a silky, hot pink glove suggestively lifting up a skirt. On the right, a photo of the author wearing heavy black eyeliner with her tongue sticking out.
Brittany Newell's second novel 'Soft Core' hits shelves Feb. 4. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

In Brittany Newell‘s new novel, Soft Core (out Feb. 4 via Farrar, Straus and Giroux), a sex worker searches for her missing ex-boyfriend in San Francisco’s kinky underbelly. Though it’s about a missing person, Newell professes that the book actually tells a love story.

“Every love story is inherently a mystery,” the author muses in a recent interview, “because the nature of being in love is being hounded by questions and what-ifs, and never truly knowing the other person that you’re trying so hard to crack the code of.”

Newell is a writer and performer who lives in San Francisco with her wife, the scholar Maria Silk. For the book, she pulled from her experiences as a sex worker and dominatrix in the Bay Area. “I had been trying to find the right format to write about all of my funny and tragic and tender sex work stories,” Newell says.

She was awarded a grant from the San Francisco Arts Commission that allowed her to rent office space in North Beach in 2022 and work on the book. (That year, an excerpt appeared in n+1.) Enter: Ruth.

“I am not Ruth,” Newell clarifies to avoid the typical and undermining author-character slippage that occurs when women write fiction.

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“But,” she continues, “every dungeon session — and the description of the dungeon that Ruth eventually starts working at — is thinly veiled nonfiction.”

In addition to her job as an exotic dancer, Ruth begins to work at a dungeon located between Berkeley and Richmond that she refers to as Dream House. It’s based on Fantasy Makers, a real-life dungeon Newell worked at in El Cerrito.

“It was in this old family house in the suburbs, and that’s where I learned everything,” Newell recalls. “Once I started doing that, I stopped doing the other types of sex work and was just like, ‘Oh, this is the perfect job for a writer, because it’s literally people telling me their deepest fantasies.’ As a writer, I am already obsessed with fantasy so it felt really fortuitous.”

Soft Core takes its title from Ruth’s signature scent, a perfume that smells of “liquorice and orchids, leather and plums, [and] borrowed cigarettes.” For much of the book she goes by her stage name: Baby. It’s a generic endearment bartenders call everyone, but when they started calling her that at the club, the character explains, “I felt hailed.”

She and her significantly older ex, Dino, a ketamine dealer who used to cook at Zuni Café, share a cozy Victorian in the Mission. When he suddenly disappears without a trace, her thoughts scatter into a million directions and timelines, including their romantic past, for clues. The story is “a non-normative” mystery because the plot isn’t driving the narrative as much as the book’s aura, which Newell characterizes as “a riff on those sleazy, erotic, thriller-noir movies that are often set in San Francisco from the ’90s.”

Newell’s vision of the city is swathed in fog and trap doors. Her writing offers no glamourising or softening touch. It’s both raw and literary. Ruth’s fellow dominatrixes and dancers are empoweringly self-aware and their voices feel authentic, like they’re being relayed by someone who knows them, and knows aliases and artifice and troubles are occupational prerequisites.

“That sort of atmospheric mistiness was something that I tried to harness not just to describe San Francisco as a setting, but also to describe Ruth’s fractal mental state as she wanders around and loses touch with reality,” Newell explains.

Dino’s disappearance is the kind of sinkhole mystery that eats up questions without spitting out answers. And the longer he’s missing, the more eerie and dangerous his absence seems to Ruth. She begins to unravel, which takes the form of accepting more and more risks — including entering into a game of “erotic tic-tac-toe” with a mysterious stranger, corresponding with a client who wants her to kill him, and plunging herself deeper into San Francisco’s kink scene. Newell writes about Ruth’s sessions with clients and their myriad kinks with unabashed detail. Though Ruth is insecure about her looks, body and ability to perform, she’s refreshingly nonjudgmental towards her clients.

Newell smartly crafts Ruth as deeply curious about her profession. Useful, not only because she is an amateur sleuth with a case on the backburner, but because she is curious about lust and desire themselves, leading to stimulating philosophizing about the social function of sex work, taboo and intimacy.

“I love to write about nightlife and margins and the things that people do to make life bearable, whether that’s parties or hiring sex workers or having these fantasy worlds,” Newell shares. Her writing about those subjects appeared in a regular column for Dazed Digital from 2017–’18.

“San Francisco has a storied history and a relationship with kink that is different from anywhere else,” Newell reflects. “When I’ve talked to friends in Paris or Berlin, their eyes always light up when I say I’m from San Francisco. … There’s just an embodied history of fetish and leather and sexual deviancy in San Francisco that may be paler now, but you can still feel it if you know where to go or know the right people.”

As she accumulates sessions, Ruth realizes that all of the men who visit her have secrets, which she keeps “like hickeys hidden under a scarf,” Newell writes. To the lonely, searching men of the Bay Area, she is a therapist, a part-time lover, “a cross between a booty call and a suicide hotline.”

Soft Core is a cross too, between a mystery and a love story. Though it reaches a satisfying resolution, the larger gift is the journey — through Ruth’s memories and through San Francisco. In this way, it is Newell’s love letter to the city that helped her become who she is today. At 19 years old, she and her now-wife fled the isolation they felt at Stanford for gay bars in San Francisco like Aunt Charlie’s Lounge, the last queer bar in the Tenderloin. There she was exposed to “weird drag” that changed her life, and began performing as her alter ego, Britney Smearz.

“You’re still unjaded when you’re 19, so even a shitty performance to Celine Dion can really wow you,” she jokes, before getting serious and explaining that the venue “is where I started to feel like a real person and to learn a lot about the things that would later structure my art, my aesthetic [and] worldview.”

She, her wife and their friend Myles Cooper now host Angels, a monthly party at Aunt Charlie’s that is an offshoot of Cooper’s former High Fantasy parties there. Attendees, Newell notes, are “a very San Francisco mixture” of “street queens and art kids and ancient alcoholics and leather daddies from the bath house across the street.”

Like the San Francisco in her book, it’s a haven for kink.


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On Jan. 30, Brittany Newell will read from ‘Soft Core’ at The Stud (1123 Folsom St., San Francisco), along with readings by Brontez Purnell and Cornelius and DJ sets by Josh Cheon and Chuck Gunn. Details here

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