Click to read a pdf sample of this book.

The true nature of sexual passion is Patriarchy’s best-kept secret. It’s kept so secret that even we, women, outsiders of Partriarchy, don’t know about it. We joke about bed death in our relationships. We have resigned ourselves to the old wives’ tale of patriarchal thinking: that hot sex and passion fade from any relationship in the blink of an eye.

So how to discover the true nature of sexual passion? Where do we find it?

Hold your breath—it is in intimate, long-term relationships. Why there? This is what True Secrets of Lesbian Desire is about. Find out how taking the risk of knowing your lover and being known, intimately known, in all your sexual fear, shame, and longing, opens the door to lasting passion.

“Stendhal is onto something. True Secrets of Lesbian Desire is the start of serious dialogue on lesbian relationships, emphasizing their validity and showing that, like any other relationship, they are worth working for.”

Jano, Lambda Book Report

“This book is a welcome addition to the small number of lesbian self-help psychology books on the market. Using examples of couple interaction in therapy sessions, Stendhal cites cases from her practice in which self-awareness was achieved. She takes special aim at the shame some women experience around sex.”

Sonja Freneta, Gay and Lesbian Review

“What a compassionate and useful little book, so full of heart and good sense. Renate Stendhal brings to her work deep understanding about intimacy that will benefit any couple ready to take the next step in love and passion.”

Carol Queen, Ph.D., author of Exhibitionism for the Shy

“(F)ew self-help books tackle women’s issues with a more politicized lens and increased sensitivity. True Secrets examines women’s longterm relationships and asserts that truth-telling as political act can create a deeper love and is the healthiest, ‘least costly’ and most effective strategy available.”

Nicole Braun, Foreward

“Renate Stendhal’s unique words of wisdom are wonderful and have an important message for everyone.”

Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, co-authors of Lesbian/Woman

“In [True Secrets of Lesbian Desire], Renate Stendhal delves into discussing sexuality from a woman’s point of view; a topic too often ignored today. A San Francisco Bay Area counselor and award-winning author, Stendhal encourages us to debunk the myths that surround sexuality and to explore our own unique and creative desires.

The book is based on the relationship issues of lesbian couples but it deals with a question asked worriedly by people of all sexualities: What do you do when you and your lover are having problems with your sex life? It is a scenario many of us have gone through; we meet someone and the sex seems great. Time passes and the relationship becomes more serious but the sex just is not what it once was. What now?

Stendhal brings up the idea that we, as a society, are forced to conform to a mainstream conception of sexuality and in doing so, we bury our own secret desires. Her antidote for breaking down barriers in one’s sexuality is to combat them with pure and stark truths found through intense self-discovery. She encourages us to reach beyond shame and fear to uncover truths with our partner. This process and result is promised to be more fulfilling, sexually and emotionally, then all of the so-called passions of the “honeymoon” phase of a relationship.

[True Secrets] does not dish out the generic and insipid advice too often found in commercial, self-help books. Instead, Stendhal offers her advice gently and sincerely in this deeply personal guide. While narrating accounts of her patients undergoing the process of reaching their full potential in their sexuality by producing honesty and tenderness within a couple, we learn to rediscover sexuality in our own terms.”

Hajera Ghori

“For years now, women have been told that we don’t have to settle for second best, that we have a right to get what we want in relationships and in bed. Finally, Renate Stendhal has arrived to show us, reassuringly and lovingly, how cultivating radical honesty—about who we are, where we’ve been, what we want, and how we want it—gives us the tools to stop settling and start creating the relationships and sex lives we really want, without starting over from scratch.”

Hanne Blank, author of Big Big Love: A Sourcebook on Sex for People of Size and Those Who Love Them

“Renate Stendhal’s book contains a passionate message in a deceptively small package. It is full of gentle wisdom, insight, encouragement, and, most important, hope.”

Merryl A. Sloane, GreatSexSecretDesires.com

“Tracking all these mutual quests for honest relationships, Renate’s small and beautiful volume almost made me wish to be in one myself. I’ll keep it handy, should the occasion arise.”

Alix Dobkin, singer/songwriter

“This lovely book—in design, in language, in ideas—is not so much a rigid how-to manual as it is a gently persuasive here’s-how book. [True Secrets of Lesbian Desire] is suffused with sound advice on how to relate with one’s lover, much of it drawn from the author’s own counseling work with lesbian couples. Its intensely personal and emotionally honest tone, however, transforms it from mere sex-therapy guide into a myth-debunking work positing that trust and truth are the keys to unlocking long-term erotic potential and pleasure.

Stendhal . . . is in turn playful, stern, practical, and philosophical—a warm teacher whose wisdom belongs in the life of every lesbian stuck on the myth of lesbian bed death.”

Richard Labonte Book Marks, Q-Syndicate

“. . . This book is a tremendous resource, not just for lesbians, but for ALL women who want to get the most out of their sexual relationships. Move over Dr. Ruth, here comes Renate Stendhal!”

A Reader, Amazon.com

von Renate Stendhal
Krug & Schadenberg (Juni 2004)

Amazon-Preis: EUR 16,00

(Illustrated by the author)
Hardcover: EdgeWork Books, Berkeley, CA, 2002
List Price: $24.95
Available at your local book store
and at Amazon.

Click to read a pdf sample of this book.

A book for the child in every adult, and for the wisdom in every child. A story about the magic in daily life, the mystery in human relationships, and the powers of healing through understanding and compassion. Zelda is a feisty, often angry thirteen-year-old girl in Los Angeles. She resents the arrival in her family of an orphaned German boy who is eleven and brings with him only a battered suitcase, a grasshopper in a cage, and a troubled past. Zelda scorns the boy’s sensitivity, his eagerness to please, and his name Kidcou, short for Kid Courage. When she chances upon the secret of Kidcou’s grasshopper, she is taken on a magical journey. She becomes the witness of the dramatic story of Kidcou’s life in Europe. In the course of the events, she notices that the Grasshopper is plotting something, and that she herself may be part of the plot. As the suspense grows, everything comes to depend on Zelda. Will she guess the Grasshopper’s intentions and understand her mission? Will she be able to enter Kidcou’s story and change his destiny?

“Time travel with a grasshopper! This is a cute, literate story about a thirteen-year-old girl named Zelda and Kidcou, an orphaned German boy of eleven, who her parents have taken in. Zelda resents Kidcou—he is everything that she is not—sensitive, eager to please, sociable. Her parents seem to like him more than her! But when Zelda finds that Kidcou’s grasshopper can take her on a journey to the past in Italy, she discovers (like Scrooge via the three ghosts of Christmas) that she has a heart after all. A light read, but satisfying. For 5th – 8th graders.”

Debbie Reagan, Bay Area Young Adult Librarians

“The Grasshopper’s Secret is a story about the magic in everyday life, the wisdom of nature, the mystery in human relationships, and the powers of healing through understanding and compassion.

In this story the characters can easily identify with real life teenage kids who rebel in their own way, trying to find their own personality through their unique magical journey in life. The writer touches our hearts from the very first chapter of this book and makes the readers feel they have to read on to see how the story unfolds.

The plot has a tint of magic, combined with geography and history, and they blend together in such a perfect way that the outcome is a compelling, magical story.

The Grasshopper’s Secret is also moving and highly enjoyable, and caters to all, young and old. Renate Stendhal has definitely found the magic wand that transforms stories into mysteries. The author shows her magic in many parts of the story, such as when the grasshopper gets ready to take the heroine on a magical journey to Italy: ‘The grasshopper was growing . Or was she shrinking? Her body seemed to be falling away, weightless, to be lifted in the air by the curious gaze that wouldn’t let go of her. She tried to scream but the rushing of a strong wind pressed the scream back into her throat.’

The Grasshopper’s Secret is a good read for everyone who loves fiction.”

Liana Metal, The Compulsive Reader

by Renate Stendhal

Gertrude Stein, famous for her words, was as interested in being seen as she was in being read. She posed for thousands of photographs during her lifetime–snapshots and studio photos by some of the twentieth century’s most famous image makers, including Cecil Beaton, Imogen Cunningham, and Man Rae. Renate Stendhal has selected three hundred and sixty photographs–more than a hundred seen her for the first time–of Gertrude Stein, her companion Alice B. Toklas, and the many familiar and famous faces who surrounded her. These photographs, artfully matched with texts from Stein’s work, present a new form of biography and make up a distinctive new portrait of the mother of modernism in the expatriate circles of 1920s Paris.

“Who was Gertrude Stein? The social and artistic dominatrix of the lost generation? The literary founder of modernism? The sensual companion of Alice B. Toklas? ‘Dictator of Art?’ An ‘infant prodigy?’ Stein, whose freedom with the written word, “liberated language from the 19th Century,” remains a heroine hard to grasp. Now, as the Century turns, Renate Stendhal’s Gertrude Stein: In Words and Pictures . . . takes a good look at the slippery genius. After an astonishing, playful essay, the book opens into a revelatory combination of quotes, clips, and 360 photos of Stein and her wildly brilliant circle. The subtle minimalism of Stein’s cool face, repeating page to page, like her own rhythmic sentences, brings a nuanced embodiment to our incomplete sense of her. From a serious, chin-in-air profile of “Gertie” at age three, to a chin-in-hands portrait taken at age 72, the woman is “a rose is a rose is a rose.”

Bethany Schneider, Elle

“Thanks to a deep, and astute understanding of Gertrude Stein’s life and work, Berkeley writer Renate Stendhal has created a welcome and beautifully designed photo-biography of this most amazing Mother of Modernism . . . No matter how little or how much you know about Stein and her long time companion and lover, Alice B. Toklas, this slick, thick and nearly square . . . book can be read on several levels at once. More than a hundred of its 360 photographs have never been published . . . (F)or many, of course, reading Gertrude Stein is far more difficult than looking at pictures, and here Stendhal becomes both welcome advocate and critic. She acknowledges that speaking German, French, English and Yiddish helps, but she also believes “Stein’s work seems less and less alien” as we learn more “about the multi-lingual context of her writing,” and “the erotic side of her life. . . .” [The book] will endure as long as the words and images of Stein herself.”

Patricia Holt, San Francisco Chronicle

“The amateur . . . could hardly wish for a better introduction than Ms. Stendhal’s ingenious marrying of newly discovered and well-known photographs, with familiar and unfamiliar texts; together, they amply illuminate both the public and the private Stein.”

The New York Times

“. . . (T)he focus of this entertaining book is not on Stein’s friends, followers, and victims, but on Stein herself, in all her imposing and androgynous glory . . . Stendhal’s own commentary, excellent selection of . . . photographs, and well-chosen quotes from Stein’s books and the writings of those who knew her, create an animated and illuminating portrait. After all, Stein is a Stein is a Stein . . . .”

BookList

“Renate Stendhal has added a very interesting addition to the vast body of writing about Gertrude Stein. Stein was friends with the elite of 20th Century western culture. Her guests, when she lived in Paris, would include, among many others, Picasso and Hemingway. Her fierce independence and powerful personality drew all of the best to seek out her company . . . . Although everyone has seen some photographs of Stein, few Stein fans will be able to resist this collection . . . Stendhal has organized the photographs chronologically by dividing her life into nine periods. Each period is a chapter of words and photographs introduced by an account of Stein’s life during that period. These introductions are indispensable. Each photograph is accompanied by selections from Stein’s volumes . . . It’s a coffee table book suitable for Stein fans and anyone who is curious about 20th century culture.

QUEEREVIEW

von Gertrude Stein, Renate Stendhal
Arche Verlag (Dezember 1989)

Amazon-Preis: EUR 49,00

(with Kim Chernin)
Hardcover: Harper Collins, New York, 1996
Paperback: Women’s Press, London, 1999
List Price: $24.95 Hardcover or Paperback
Available at your local book store
Get a peek inside at Amazon.

von Kim Chernin, Renate Stendhal Suhrkamp (August 1999)

Amazon-Preis: EUR 12,50

(with Kim Chernin)
Hardcover: Crown/Times Books, New York, 1989
Paperback: Ballantine Books, 1990

Available from Amazon Books/ Used Books

by Renate Stendhal with Kim Chernin

Sex and Other Sacred Games is an imaginative look at sexuality, in which a chance encounter in a Paris cafe sets off a parley, a heated discussion, an on-going dialogue, between a feminist and a femme fatale. While following the development of their relationship, the book explores all facets of passion, eroticism, and pleasure. Together, they consider the possibility of women redefining desire. The book consistently raises essential issues regarding our traditional views of sex. The two women challenge us to reconsider the meaning and making of love. They invite us to the sacred game, where sexual identity, pleasure and desire can all be re-discovered or invented from scratch.

“Sex and Other Sacred Games explores that territory where Lesbian Desire tends to come most violently undone; in the heart and bowels of a love relationship. Essentially, the book is an extended conversation between two women on the subject of sex. In the course of the conversation, which is laced with echoes of Platonic dialogue, the women fall in love. What makes this dialogue both highly charged and evocative of a whole chapter of feminist history is that one of the women, Alma Runau, is a Lesbian Feminist and the other, Claire Heller, is a self-declared (heterosexual) femme fatale.”

Trivia: A Journal of Ideas, 1991

“In Sex and Other Sacred Games, Kim Chernin and Renate Stendhal each take on a fictional character, Claire Heller an American, and Alma Runau a European, to write a book about two women who meet, separate, correspond, and meet again in an on-going, unresolved conversation about sexual roles, an attempt to redefine female sexuality. A play on Plato’s dialogues, their discourse takes place on many levels, moving among mythological, psychoanalytic, and feminist points of view. Writing alternating chapters, they attempt to bridge the geographic space and the cultural difference of their characters by allowing the censored thoughts to emerge.”

Resurgent: New Writing by Women

“The book is set in Paris, the south of France and Berkeley. The heroines are a German and an American writer, two vagabonds who are unwilling to accept any of the roles offered by society or to adapt to the rules of their time. They meet in a Paris cafe, in a race for the only remaining table that offers enough room to write. In order to defend this table, that is meant for four, but is suitable for a single person who wants to be alone in the crowd with her writing utensils, the two rivals unite as consumers and communicators, as expected in a cafe house culture . . .

“Through the diaries and letters [eventually exchanged by] the two women a cultural history of female sexuality is being shaped, while at the same time female sexuality is said not to exist. By evoking the space women have always claimed in Patriarchy, Claire Heller can demonstrate an exciting, rich and continuous female tradition. Alma Runau rejects this sort of women’s history as not inherently female… Alma Runau, a feminist artist, at the end of the 20th century is a woman without history; she has grown up in Germany, fled to Paris . . . and distanced herself, with German thoroughness, from Patriarchy. Now she meets Claire Heller with her painted face and red finger nails, two and a half years later receives Claire’s package of letters and soon afterwards finds Claire in the South of France at her doorstep without makeup, short haired, looking like a pretty boy–an adventurer who hides her true being behind costumes and masks, a story-teller, who sets unsolvable riddles. It becomes clear that Claire’s…sexual power, is not pleasure in sensuality, nor in her own experience, but is joy in the execution of power. ‘If women are so afraid of men’s power, what the hell could a woman learn about sex by going to bed with a woman,’ asks Claire? For the ardent feminist Alma, however, any kind of aggression and exercise of power is condemnable. The confrontations in this book are so palpable, clear, so exciting, annoying and creative that one wishes for an immediate translation into German in order to start an urgently needed discussion.”

Liesebuch, April 1991

“A superb dissection of current feminism.

“Chernin and Stendhal have crafted a wonderful, dualistic examination of the current trends of feminism in this novel. Each author wrote the chapters that are from her character’s point of view, offering conflicting and interwoven styles of globa feminist thought. Using tools such as mythic references and dream sequences, dialogue and letter formats, and clashes between cultures, Chernin and Stendhal work through the often disparate and incompatible notions of feminism that exist throughout the world. A must-read for anyone searching for a new definition of feminist mores.”

A Reader, Amazon.com

“Evocative…As different as Alma and Claire are…both face the ways they sexually trap themselves, lose their way, repeat patterns, burn out. And both are ready for the next step, a new sacred game . . . (I)t is refreshing to find a book devoted entirely to a friendship (and more) between women”

The Women’s Review of Books

“This collaboration demonstrates that communication between women of diverse sexual preferences, practices, and politics may lead to great mutual understanding and empowerment.”

Library Journal