The cartoon is of a grinning cat, playfully rolling on its back. Contained within is a personal ad reading: “Kat Boy, 20 year-old male. Loves to be clawed and scratched. Can growl but prefers to purr. Seeks male or female to pet, lick and bite. Online: Herekittykitty.”

For those with a particular fetish (or, um, itch to scratch), personal ads are one of the few places to find that special someone, whether your desires tend towards the vanilla or require more unique solutions. Readers of Seattle’s The Stranger have used the paper’s personal ad section, Lustlab, to search for fellow thrill-seekers. Part of the draw has been Ellen Forney’s “Ad of the week.” Each issue, she picks one ad and turns it into a cartoon, and her new book, Lust: Kinky Online Personal Ads, collects the best, with extra interviews, commentary and an introduction by Savage Love’s Dan Savage.

The Stranger’s editorial staff (art director Cori Hall, editor Dan Savage and Lustlab editor Caroline Dodge) approached Forney to begin adapting ads as a way of drawing more attention to Lustlab. “I was allowed a lot of freedom in how I’d adapt the ad, with the caveat that I couldn’t just completely misrepresent the person,” she says. “So, for example, there was one woman whose ad was pretty normal — like, ‘I’m a college student, and I just moved to town, and I’m just looking for a little fun’ — nothing outrageous. Then later threw in there that the kinkiest thing she’d ever done was masturbate on a garden gnome on someone’s front lawn. That line was kind of buried in her ad, and it was hilarious. It didn’t really represent her particularly well, but it made good material.”

Reading Lust and its multitude of desires, one finds that a rather bizarre sexual fantasy — masturbating on garden gnomes — becomes part of a greater kinky landscape, rather than a singularly bizarre fetish. There are heterosexual, gay and trans couples looking to hook up for guilt-free sex; pegging, sensory deprivation, bondage, outdoors, animal costumes, one woman who “longs to watch a very fat female on the toilet,” medieval re-enactments, hypnotism, foot fucking, sissy maids and more.

“I don’t do ads that request ‘discreet’ encounters, where they don’t want their partners to know — I can’t really hang with that,” says Forney. “And I usually skip the ones where women want to be abused pretty severely by a man. Safety-wise, I don’t think Lustlab is the right forum for that, to be honest. But, regardless, I only have so much room for people who want to be tied up and really submissive. It’s a totally common kink. It isn’t easy to come across new fetishes. I love the raunchy ones — people who like musky body smells. There are plenty of those. “

You can read about a “tentacle porn-loving pirate wench,” but wouldn’t you rather see one? (Um, at least in a cartoon.) Forney’s illustrations are wild and varied, and her cartoony approach is suited to representing fetishes and desires in a disarming and inviting way. They’re hilarious and hot, sex-positive and icky-free. “One of my personal challenges was to draw sex and sexy situations without being graphic,” says Forney. “So, for example, for the garden gnome ad, I just drew a regular ol’ creepy, smiling gnome with his big fat finger in the air, in a semi-phallic-looking hat, surrounded by a bunch of semi-phallic-looking mushrooms. How do you masturbate on a garden gnome? I think it’s sexier, more fun and more interesting when the reader has to fill in the dots.”

The ads are a celebration of kinky sex — while they come from people seeking specific desires, they also offer a more inclusive vision of queerness as one of sexual possibility and openness. “Here’s this community of people who are putting their sexual desires out there — they’re being honest with themselves and with other people about what they want,” says Forney. “That’s where I’m trying to go, to allow people to look at their own selves and their own desires, and at others and their desires, with curiosity and not judgment. I do my best to present desires that could be seen as raunchy and icky, as playful and quirky. Most people probably read Lust and find very little of it actually erotic, but hopefully it can shift their paradigm of what might be considered erotic in general.”