Rent was due. Kaleigh Trace was 22 and had just graduated in the midst of a global recession with what she discovered to be an “utterly useless” BA. Venus Envy, Halifax’s local sex shop, was hiring. And they had a great book selection. Trace didn’t care if she was selling dildos or drumsticks or DVD players: a job meant she could keep a roof over her head.
But, slowly, she came to love discussing the dildos with customers—and everything else they liked playing with. “I found that talking to people about sexuality was amazing. I loved, and still love, the intimacy inherent in speaking about our desires,” she says. “And I love an opportunity to normalize the stuff that shames us.”
In time, Trace became one of Canada’s bolder voices on the erotic front. In 2014, she published her extremely frank memoir, Hot, Wet & Shaking: How I Learned To Talk About Sex, five years before she became a couples’ and sex therapist (non-monogamy and kink quandaries welcome). While it wasn’t the first book to foreground sex and disability—she is quick to namecheck trailblazers like Loree Erikson, Eli Clare, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and Mia Mingus—it remains a rare dive into both the ableism and orgasms one can experience as a femme, queer, disabled person.
“When I wrote it, I had been working at Venus Envy for six years, so I was quite steeped in the world of sex education. And, sadly, I could find so few reflections of myself there,” Trace says. “I wanted to read about the kind of sex I was having, the kind where adaptations had to be made and where there wasn’t some kind of normative ideal being upheld. Essentially, I wanted to read about queer, disabled sex. It was hard to find back then. So, I wrote myself into it.”
Now, Hot, Wet & Shaking is getting a 10th anniversary re-release, revised and expanded with a new foreword from Trace and an afterword by singer and writer Christa Couture. “It’s the story of a young, disabled femme who is in love with her body and her world and she wants you to love yours alongside her. I hope that shines through the pages,” says Trace. “I hope my book can be read as an invitation into this kind of radical delight.”
While the body of literature about disability and sex has grown a little, Trace says, the world we live in is still annoyingly premised on being able-bodied. “The way that bodies are talked about, the way that orgasms are described, what we have collectively deemed to be sexually desirable: all of these things lean on an able-bodied ideal.”
For example, when Trace started working at Venus Envy and became obsessed with learning how to orgasm, she had to work hard to figure out her own body. She’d sustained a severe spinal cord injury in a childhood car accident, which affected the way she walks and moves. “I had no guidance! It wasn’t clear to me if all of the writing that described flexing pelvic floor muscles, clitoral throbbing and g-spot ejaculations would apply to my disabled body,” she says. “Every how-to guide worked off the presumption of some kind of imagined universal norm.”
Her book is not a how-to guide, though. “It won’t tell you what an orgasm ought to feel like or what will make sex good for you,” she says. “But it will remind you that those terms are yours to decide, and that you get to build the kind of world you want to live in.”
It also revels in a fact we often forget or ignore: sex is hilarious. “Our bodies do absurd things. They make ridiculous sounds, emit weird fluids; it’s all a totally sexy and completely silly mess,” Trace says. This is why it’s so important that we stop being so hard on ourselves. If we stop expecting ourselves to be perfectly fit, or perfectly smooth, or perfectly orgasmic, or perfectly anything, she says, then we get to really be in our radiant beauty. “Trust that your body is a good body, demand nothing more of it, and you’ll find that sex is an opportunity for that kind of imaginative, funny and absorbing play we loved as children.”
Sex can also be a saviour. In the past year and a half, Trace was dealt two terrible blows: an important relationship ended, and she was diagnosed with terminal cancer. “Surviving a broken heart while grappling with your own mortality is no joke, and when I tell you that loving community saved me, I mean that loving community fucking saved me,” she says. “Falling in love and having sex is absolutely life-giving. Eros is in opposition to death—it demands our full aliveness.”
This is one of the great gifts sex gives us. Sadly, it’s a rare pleasure to be fully present and in the moment: no phone, no social media, no thinking about what we have to do tomorrow, or rent or cancer or dying. “I love the way that having sex lets me feel alive in my skin and completely attuned to myself, and my lovers,” Trace says. “I think lots of people are able to access this kind of sexual joy, but speaking as a disabled person, there is something uniquely magical about getting to respond to my body’s pleasure rather than pain, and to do something physical that I know I can fully excel at.”
Trace took a medical leave to pursue intensive cancer treatment in 2023; her illness is manageable at the moment, so she’s returned to her therapy practice. She still adores it. “To get to work with people as they do the difficult work of growing and healing with one another is an unparalleled privilege,” she says. “We’re relational animals, and we need one another, which is both completely liberating and absolutely terrifying. It takes labour to allow ourselves this right to love and be loved, to need and be needed, and I always want to be doing this work with people.”
After witnessing all this transformation, and drawing a little closer to the end of her life, is there something that she wishes everyone knew: About sexuality, about love? About humans? Trace cites an ‘80s interview between the writers Maya Angelou and Mavis Nicholson that she found on Instagram. In it, Angelou describes how once she had really admitted that she would die—“that it is the one promise that won’t be reneged upon”—then she could be fully present in her life. “And Nicholson responds, asking if this is greedy, this idea of trying to ‘take, take, take’ every moment,” says Trace. “And Angelou, in all her brilliance, says, ‘Give everything you’ve got! Not take—I mean, what is that? Give everything, all the time.’”This, Trace says, this is what she knows to be true. “What are we doing here, in our short, little lives, if not giving all we’ve got? To love, to sex, to our friends and family,” she says. “Give it all.”
The anniversary edition of Trace’s book launches July 4 at A Night of Sex and Death: Celebrating Hot, Wet and Shaking at the Society Clubhouse in Toronto, with appearances by Christa Couture, Britt Wray and Joshua Wales.