When the first coronavirus-related erotica appeared on Literotica, one of the largest erotic fiction websites, in mid-March, the moderators were not sure if it was fit to print. Within a week, they were receiving a handful of sex stories relating to the virus every single day. As billions around the world went into lockdown, some people had seemingly found a new inspiration in isolation; quarantine-related porn started to appear online, and erotica writers began to self-publish lockdown romances on Amazon. “Quarantine has given me time to get back to writing,” Silkstockinglover, one popular writer on Literotica, tells me. “I wrote a dozen stories so far.”
Given the influx of coronavirus-related erotica, the moderators decided to hold a contest. Love the One(s) You’re With saw more than 100 authors write erotic stories set during the pandemic, with thousands of readers voting on the best and the majority of the winnings going to charities. Each author faced a troubling challenge: how on earth can you make a global pandemic, ineffective national health plans, and circumstances that have led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, romantic or sexy?
“I don’t think there’s anything explicitly sexy about the pandemic itself, but any extreme situation is going to bring about fascinating experiences to explore in terms of sexuality,” says Ian Snow, one author who entered the contest. “Add in isolation, boredom, and plain physical need to the mix, and you’ve got a recipe for some pretty hot stories.”
Overall, the contest’s quarantinica can be divided into three subgenres. The first is “unexpected quarantine partners”, in which roommates, friends, and, yes, step-siblings hook up after weeks of sexual tension in their enclosed locations, with the characters often completing during or after an event that has been cancelled due to the coronavirus, such as prom or birthday parties. The second is “isolated voyeurism” in which horny individuals bond by watching each other through windows – or Windows. (Zoom features in many stories.) The third and final is best summed up as “let’s break lockdown for a quick lay”, in which people have a passionate moment while (sometimes) trying to follow WHO guidelines, either by passing around hand sanitiser, wiping down surfaces, or opting for a sexual position with less face-to-face interaction.
“The isolation of quarantine is a great literary device because it can be … an outside aid thrusting fated lovers together or an obstacle to be overcome that has kept them apart,” says author Kethandra. Others ignore all that: “If I tried to frame everything to WHO guidelines or local restrictions, I’d lose the erotic part of the erotic story,” says author Defluer.
Disease and death do appear in many of the stories, although each author has a different take on how idyllic or realistic their quarantined world is. In most of them, coronavirus is only a mild inconvenience to shagging. Although medical fetishism (medfet) is a popular kink, most of the stories are instead using the circumstances of quarantine to add spice, and weirdly, promote a kind of camaraderie. With at least 40% of the world having experienced lockdown, when the protagonist of Quarantined After Twenty Six Years? says, “I just hung up from my 475th Zoom conference”, we sigh in exhaustion with him.
It is rare that current events spawn a whole new field of erotica. (The Australian wildfires did, however, inspire a dildo that raised A$27,000 (£15,000) for charity.) But despite contest rules stating that erotica should contain “NO politics, political figures, or political themes”, the stories frequently touch on political realities, explicitly or subliminally. #13 Here by GoneGray features a US food deliveryperson who is fretting over Congressional stimulus approval and government checks, at one point saying: “I want to stay safe, but I can’t afford it.” Similarly, Conversations 18 by SleeperyJim, features a nurse working in an overwhelmed NHS hospital.
Deeper in the contest archive are tales of unregulated black markets, coronavirus misinformation, and hoarding. (Yes, toilet paper appears a lot.) And curiously, government decision-making seems to have influenced the tone of the stories; the contest’s Australian erotica feels fairly utopian when compared with the US stories, with people sexily quarantining in hotel rooms paid for by the government or in isolated estates with swimming pools – perhaps a cultural side effect of Australia’s more successful response.
“We have a long, beautiful history of taking terrible events and finding something of beauty within them,” Ian Snow says. “The second world war gave us a deluge of heartfelt, wonderful romance stories.” As Kethandra adds, “There would be no Gone With the Wind without a horrible war.” But the second world war, the US civil war and Reconstruction also destroyed the lives of countless loving couples, both real and fictional. While a mishandled quarantine provides conflict and restrictions for storytelling, it also creates anxious, terrified characters. As one commenter wrote below the story Conversations 18, in which a man videocalls his nurse wife at work and accidentally witnesses her in congress with two colleagues, the contest’s purpose “is to escape the depression of reality. You did a great job in depressing me further with this story.”
The competition’s winners may be surprising to some. Both the first place story, Late Night Conversations by JoeDreamer, and runner-up Unseen Love by Bebop3 and MsCherylTerra, were slow-burn romances between neighbours, in which the couples’ relationships build gradually over thousands of words as they navigate home repairs and sick family members. Despite the vaccine-related dirty talk, lockdown orgies, and Zoom sex present in the genre, sometimes the things people crave most are the simplest: having conversations and befriending neighbours.
As the winners pick which charities to donate to, many of the authors are still writing stories, although none of those I spoke to were sure how much their next story would feature PPE or TP. As Corpse_rider, author of The Girl in the Face Mask, told me, “Wearing face masks is something we’re all going to have to get used to, and characters in contemporary fiction settings will need to put them on too.” Meanwhile, Kethandra, who writes erotica professionally, says that earlier in the pandemic, his publisher initially balked at the idea of coronavirus-related erotica, fearing ridicule. Three months later, his publisher has started to release quarantine erotica.
