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If you want the best sex of your life, you’re going to have to be vulnerable.

This is a lesson disabled queer author and therapist Kaleigh Trace first delivered to Canadian audiences when her book Hot, Wet and Shaking: How I Learned to Talk about Sex first hit bookshelves a decade ago.

Now she’s back with a 10th-anniversary edition that includes an updated introduction and chapters about her terminal cancer diagnosis.

Trace, now dealing with that diagnosis, explores grief and her own mortality with the same openness, messiness, hilarity and beauty she brings to her exploration of sexual discovery and acceptance.

Sex has many links to your health. Beyond pleasure, partnered sex can improve sleep, and masturbation can reduce stress and blood pressure while boosting your immune system, and even reduce mortality.

Hot, Wet and Shaking narrates Trace’s life, from when she was a small-town Ontario teenager desperate to lose her virginity as a means of achieving adulthood, to her years working in a feminist Halifax sex shop where she learned we all want to have better sex but often don’t know how — and are afraid to ask.

“Nobody is born knowing how to have sex; we’re all figuring it out,” Trace said over a video interview from her therapy practice in Toronto.

The same goes for dying.

Dying is rarely tidy. As Trace writes, sometimes it includes wearing your most expensive cashmere robe and running towards the toilet while suffering from diarrhea, your friends running alongside you to hoist the robe out of the way. Other times it’s crying hard enough to give yourself a nosebleed in a doctor’s office.

“You come to the realization that, of course, you’re dying. I was already dying, was always going to die. We’re all just ‘temporaries on this earth,’” Trace writes, quoting Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals.

The Tyee sat down with Trace to talk about how to improve sex education for all ages, how to embrace life’s beauty and fragility and what sex and death have in common. The following interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

The Tyee: I wish Hot, Wet and Shaking had been around when I was a preteen. It would have been such an empowering lesson to learn that sex and pleasure is incredible and hilarious, awkward, messy and completely and entirely unique to each individual. Why don’t we talk about this side of sex more?

Kaleigh Trace: The culture that we live in here in Canada is so steeped in shame, patriarchy and really normative ideas about bodies, and how they’re supposed to look and perform, that we leave very little room to be honest about the things that we do and don’t know about our bodies. This performative dishonesty shows up in all of the ways that we learn to have sex with each other.

What do you mean by performative dishonesty?

It’s pretending we know what we’re doing, what we like, pretending that we’re not worried about how our bodies look and acting the way we think our gender is meant to perform.

Examples of this are men are always supposed to know how to fuck, men are always hard, they always want it. Women are the gatekeepers, they want to be submissive, women shouldn’t be too much. All of these messages are so encoded from such a young age.

To figure out how to really have interesting sex, we need to undo a lot of stuff first.

Performative dishonesty is living in these gendered, oppressive stories. This doesn’t mean someone is bad for being dishonest. It’s that we’re performing until we can figure out “Oh! Wait, I don’t need to do it this way.”

Are there other ways you’d like to reform sex education, or the way we talk about sex?

In my fantasy world the socio-cultural conversations about sex — these big-picture avenues where we get all kinds of stories about sex — are rooted in everyone’s right to feel bodily pleasure and everyone’s responsibility to respect each other’s bodies. A world where the tenets of sex are respect and pleasure would be radically different than right now, where the tenets of the sex that we receive are power and shame.

This means there’s so much secrecy, violence and work that we all do to figure out how to come to sex with pleasure, care and respect. I wish it was different.

I loved reading Hot, Wet and Shaking because you are so rigorously honest and vulnerable when talking about these deeply personal topics. Because you were so open I felt like I trusted you to talk about sex. Can you tell me more about your “Hey, me too” approach?

“Rigorously honest” is the perfect way to describe me. It’s just who I am. I’m a really forthcoming person who is pretty comfortable with vulnerability. I’ve always been that way. But when I wrote the book, I’d been working at Venus Envy, a sex shop in Halifax, for five years. So I’d already had five years of having people approach me with so much shame about their sexual desires, mistakes, wants or misunderstandings.

It was eye-opening to be young and have people of all ages tell you, “I don’t know what I’m doing.” It made me feel really safe to write about how we don’t know what we’re doing. That’s part of the process. The tone in the book was an outcome of working in the sex shop as long as I had.

In the book you talk about a longing for “all of us — my disabled kin, especially — to trust in the inherent divinity of our bodies, the aliveness of them, while we have them.” This captures body positivity and grief, but let’s start with the positivity. That even if your legs are hard to control, you celebrate the strength of your arms and the cunning of your teeth to hold things. How do you help people realize their body, in all its soft, tender glory, is divine?

I’ve been thinking about that quote a lot because I’ve been reading Mary Oliver a lot, as many queers do, and many dying people do. She really celebrates the divinity of our lives and our bodies and this world. I feel so grateful, I am really overcome with how grateful I am, to get to just experience this incredible world in this incredible body. I’m incredibly lucky.

I don’t think there’s any way to teach people to be aware of this luck and gratitude. At least I don’t know how to do it. But I can say we will suffer. We will all suffer and we will all die. If we experience suffering, we can use it as an excellent invitation to feel the divinity of our bodies, into feeling really alive.

There’s no way to teach gratitude and self-acceptance but I hope that we all get through the trials and tribulations which are coming for us.

You write about your diagnosis and grief with the same radical honesty and vulnerability you use to talk about sex. May I ask how you’re doing?

I wrote the foreword and the chapter about grieving my life really in the middle of it. Like I was offered this deal to republish a few weeks before I found out that my cancer was terminal. I already knew I had cancer. I thought it wasn’t terminal, and then I found out it was.

I was really grieving as I wrote and edited the book for the final time before this 10th anniversary came out. I was like, “Oh my God. These tones are so jarring.” I am so fucking sad as a 37-year-old and I was just so fucking joyful as a 27-year-old. But I’m glad the honesty transcends.

My health right now is confusing. Cancer has changed dramatically in recent years, and in some ways, I would say that I live with a chronic illness that will kill me and will kill me sooner than later. I don’t know when, but death is on its way.

When I was writing the book, I’d been given a two-year diagnosis and this December will be two years. I think I’ll probably live past them, but the cancer keeps coming back. Right now the cancer is back and I’m in chemo again. I’ve been in treatment of various types since the diagnosis, and that will continue until it doesn’t anymore.

And I’m speaking to you at your work, and you’ve got a fresh book deal despite all of that. That’s really impressive.

Thank you. I did stop working when I got my diagnosis. I closed my private practice because I was given two years to live — I wasn’t gonna work!

But then I responded very well to the treatments and my oncologist encouraged me to keep living as I’m here and I’m here kind of indefinitely. So it’s been nice. I had an entire 13 months off. I just went back to work in February. It’s been great.

It’s surprising how much sex and grief have in common. I’m curious if sex has taught you anything about grief, or if grief has taught you anything about sex?

For my book launches I’ve been doing these sex and death salons and it’s been really fun. Here’s what I wrote for them:

“Sex and death are in opposition to one another, and in this way, they are linked. Both demand your full attention. Both will break your heart. When faced, when you let yourself fully accept that death is coming for you — and it is — it will reveal itself as an invitation to live to your fullest. Sex, when done right, invites the same. We all desire. We all will die. In this way we’re all vulnerable here together.”

You know, I wouldn’t have chosen to have to think about my death as much as I have to think about it.

But there’s so much strength in vulnerability. Vulnerability taught me how to have good sex. Now I’m figuring out how to die and vulnerability is teaching me how to have a good death because it allows for so much more connection with other people.

That’s the thing I learned that really transcends both these experiences.

I have one final question. The people need to know: how are the plans coming along to die “while having a gay orgy with a bunch of queer, disabled perverts”?

Ha! Short answer: it’s in the works. A more honest answer is that it’s been a wild year and, at the same time my diagnosis came, my relationship of six years ended. So I’ve been dating for the first time in years while also being very mortal, and it’s been amazing and difficult and incredible. I should really update my Feeld profile to say, ‘Help me have a death orgy.’ I haven’t done it yet, but I might.

The 10th-anniversary edition of ‘Hot, Wet and Shaking: How I Learned to Talk about Sex’ hit bookstore shelves across the country this summer.

— This story was originally published by The Tyee.

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