The rent was due. Kaylee Trace was 22 years old and had just graduated from a bachelor’s degree during the Great Recession when she realized she was “completely useless.” Venus Envy, a local sex shop in Halifax, was hiring. And they had a great selection of books. Trace didn’t care if they were selling dildos, drumsticks, or DVD players; a job would keep a roof over her head.
But she gradually grew to love talking to her clients about dildos and all the other things they like to play with. “I found it great to talk to people about sexuality. I loved, and still love, the intimacy that comes with talking about our desires,” she said. “And I love the opportunity to normalize the things that make us feel embarrassed.”
Author Kaylee Trace’s sex education began while working in a sex shop in Halifax.
Krista Como
Trace has quickly become one of Canada’s boldest voices in the erotic field. In 2014, she published her strikingly candid memoir, Hot, Wet & Shaking: How I Learned To Talk About Sex, five years before she became a couples and sex therapist (conundrums of non-monogamy and sexuality are welcome). While it wasn’t the first book to foreground sex and disability (she’s quick to name-drop pioneers like Laurie Erickson, Eli Clare, Leah Lakshmi Pieptuna Samarasinha and Mia Mingus), it is one of the rare books to delve into both ableism and orgasm as a woman, queer and disabled person.
“When I wrote the book, I’d been working at Venus Envy for six years, so I was immersed in the sex-ed world, and sadly, I found very little that reflected myself in it,” says Trace, who now lives in Toronto. “I wanted to read about the kind of sex I was having, sex that required accommodations and didn’t adhere to normative ideals. Essentially, I wanted to read about queer and disabled sex, which was hard to find at the time. So I wrote myself into it.”
Now, for its 10th anniversary, Hot, Wet & Shaking has been republished, revised and expanded with a new foreword by Trace and an afterword by singer and author Krista Couture. “This is the story of a disabled young woman who is in love with her body and the world, and she wants readers to love their bodies along with her, and I hope that comes across through the pages,” Trace says. “I hope my book is read as an invitation to this kind of radical joy.”
‘Hot, Wet & Shaking’ by Kaleigh Trace.
Invisible Publishing
Despite a gradual increase in the literature on disability and sex, Trace says the troubling thing is that we still live in an able-bodied world: “The way we talk about bodies, the way we describe orgasms, what we collectively consider to be sexually desirable, all of these things are driven by able-bodied ideals.”
When Trace started working at Venus Envy and became obsessed with learning how to orgasm, she had to work hard to understand her own body. She had suffered severe spinal cord injuries in a car accident as a child, which affected the way she walked and moved. “There was no guidance! All the writing about flexing your pelvic floor muscles, pulsating your clit, and G-spot ejaculation, I had no idea how it applied to my disabled body,” she says. “All the how-to guides were premised on some kind of imagined universal standard.”
But her book isn’t a how-to guide: “It won’t tell you what an orgasm should feel like or how to make sex good for you,” she says, “but it will remind you that those conditions are up to you, and that you can build the world you want to live in.”
The book also pokes fun at a fact we often forget or ignore: sex is fun. “Our bodies do silly things—we make silly noises, we release weird fluids, and it’s all very sexy and a completely ridiculous mess,” Trace says. That’s why it’s so important to stop being so hard on ourselves. If we stop expecting to be perfectly healthy, perfectly smooth, perfectly orgasmic, or just about anything perfect, she says, we can truly be in our radiant beauty. “Just trust that your body is a good body, and don’t ask for anything more. Then you’ll find that sex is an opportunity for the kind of imaginative, fun, immersive play you loved as a kid.”
Sex can also be a savior. In the past year and a half, Trace has suffered two major blows: the end of a significant relationship and a terminal cancer diagnosis. “Getting through heartbreak while wrestling with your own mortality is no joke. When I say a loving community saved me, I mean a loving community really did save me,” she says. “Falling in love and having sex is truly life-giving. Eros is the opposite of death and demands that we live fully.”
“Last summer I had a huge birthday party for myself, kind of a wake. This is a picture with all my best friends!” says Kaylee Trace.
Corey Eisener
This is one of the great gifts that sex gives us. Sadly, it’s a rare pleasure to be fully present and enjoy the moment — no phone calls, no social media, no thoughts of what you have to do tomorrow or the rent or cancer or death. “When I have sex, I feel alive in my own skin and I find myself completely in tune with myself and my partner,” Trace says. “I think a lot of people can access this kind of sexual pleasure, but speaking as a person with a disability, there’s something uniquely magical about responding to physical pleasure instead of pain, and doing something physical that you’re completely good at.”
Trace took a leave of absence in 2023 to undergo intensive cancer treatment, but has now returned to therapy as her condition is manageable. She still loves her therapy work. “It’s a unique privilege to work with people as they do the difficult work of growing and healing each other,” she says. “We are relational animals and we need each other. It’s completely liberating and it’s also very scary. It takes work to allow ourselves this right to love and be loved, to need and be needed. I’m always open to doing this work with people.”
In addition to her writing, Kaylee Trace also works as a couples and sex therapist.
HZD Photography
Now that she’s witnessed all these changes, and is nearing the end of her life, is there anything she wants everyone to know? About sexuality, about love, about humanity? Trace quotes an interview she found on Instagram with ’80s authors Maya Angelou and Mavis Nicholson, in which Angelou says she was able to be fully present in her life when she truly accepted her mortality – “that’s the one promise that can never be broken.” “And Nicholson responds by asking, ‘Isn’t this idea of taking, taking, taking, taking, greedy?'” Trace says. “And Angelou, in her brilliant words, says, ‘Give it all you’ve got! Not take it, but what is it? Give it all, all the time.'”
Trace said she knows this to be true. “What are we doing here, in this short life, if we’re not giving it everything we’ve got – to love, to sex, to friends and family,” she said. “Give it all.”
The anniversary edition of Trace’s book will be launched at the Society Clubhouse on July 4th at “A Night of Sex and Death: Celebrating “Hot, Wet & Shaking,” featuring Krista Couture, Britt Ray and Joshua Wales.
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