inspire me June 14, 2011

This one’s a challenge to you, dear readers.

I’ve been invited to read some erotica at this Sunday’s Boston launch of the second issue of Salacious Magazine, the new queer porn mag on the block. I said yes, but the thing is, I haven’t written much of substance in quite some time, and I feel funny recycling older (if still unpublished) stories too many times.

Now, one of the things I’ve very much enjoyed doing in the last couple of years is writing super-short stories on a given theme, with a five- or ten-minute time limit. For some reason that particular exercise stokes my creative fires. (You can read the results of the last two times I did this here and here.)

So with that in mind, I’m inviting you to contribute your ideas. Give me a theme – one word is best, but no more than three. You can tweet them to me (@sexgeekAZ), e-mail them to me (veryqueer3 at yahoo dot ca), or post them in the comments here. Every day from now til Sunday, I’ll collect your themes, and I’ll take the three most inspiring and write a five-minute piece on each of them. If you leave me an e-mail address and I wrote on the theme you gave me, I’ll send you what I wrote, so you get it all to yourself for a few days. On Sunday, I’ll pick the best of the best and read them at the launch. That night, I’ll post them here.

Over to you, dear readers. Hit me with your best shot, and I’ll see if I can hit you back!

a play and a panel November 27, 2009

Queer tip of the week: go see My Mother’s Lesbian Jewish Wiccan Wedding. Only in Canada, I tell ya, would you have a musical production made based on a true lesbian love story set on the Rideau Canal in Ottawa during the ice sculpture festival, with the two main characters being a Jewish psychology professor at Ottawa U and a Wiccan control freak who sings in a choir. Seriously hilarious. Songs include “Hot Lesbian Action,” “You Don’t Need a Penis” and “Straight White Male.” Oh my god.

Okay, it does get a bit tiresome in its equation of marriage and love, as though marriage is the only thing that legitimates love; and it’s also tiresome in its treatment of Hooters girls (“sluts!”). So it’s got its dose of garden-variety sexual conservatism, really, but it’s no worse than any other mainstream gay and lesbian cultural production. If you can get past that, and it’s not too hard, the rest of it is an absolute scream.

Oh, and is it a Canadian thing to watch that old movie Die Hard, with Bruce Willis, every year at Christmas? I didn’t think it was a common tradition, but my brothers and I have been doing it for, oh, jeez, over a decade now? And apparently the son in MMLJWW does it too.

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On a totally unrelated note, I’m judging Mr. Leather Toronto this weekend, and there’s gonna be a Judges’ Panel on Saturday (tomorrow) from 1:30 to 3 on the topic of “Mentorship and the Leather Journey.” I’ll be speaking on said panel. I have no idea what I’ll be saying, but that’s probably because most of it will be Q&A, so it’s a bit up to you! The MLT seminar program details are here, and I believe you can sign up for them individually at a cost of ten bucks, so if you happen to be in Toronto, come on by. The line-up is pretty fantastic actually.

solitude November 21, 2009

Classic wisdom dictates that introverts and extroverts are diametrically opposed. Introverts are inward-focused, not terribly social, quiet and thinky and uncommunicative. Extroverts are loud and friendly and sociable, given to action rather than thought, and more than happy to express themselves. As Wikipedia tells me, “Extroversion and introversion are generally understood as a single continuum. Thus, to be high on one is necessarily to be low on the other.”

A friend of mine once explained it in a different way. She said that classically, an introvert is perfectly capable of being sociable, but finds that the more intense social interaction is, the more draining it is; they recharge by being alone. On the flip side, an extrovert finds that social interaction itself is what recharges them and brings their energy up.

The Wikipedia definition does make room for the existence of what are termed “ambiverts,” or people who sit in the middle of the continuum. It also makes room for people who fluctuate throughout their lives, going through stages of greater introversion and greater extroversion.

What’s missing, though, is a discussion of those who sit on the whole continuum at once, or who fluctuate based on circumstances. For example, their sample questionnaire features ten questions, all of which I would answer with both “I agree” and “I disagree,” or perhaps by stubbornly writing “it depends” on each one. Binaries just don’t work for me, I guess. I wonder though – I am surely not the only one who feels this way. Is there really no theory that makes room for that? For people who can both be the life of the party and be a wallflower, maybe even on the same night? Are these personality traits necessarily mutually exclusive, such that to become higher on one causes its “opposite” to go lower? It just seems awfully simplistic. Of course I’m no psychologist, and I don’t believe Wiki has all the answers, so maybe theories do exist to encompass people’s more nuanced realities. But it’s late and I’m tired and I wouldn’t know where to start researching anyway. So I’ll simply suggest that people who don’t fit the seesaw model do exist. Maybe we should call ourselves multiverts. I know, that sounds a lot like a person who has multiple perversions, but hey, that’s okay with me too.

Needless to say, this hearkens back to some classic discussions around issues of bisexuality and queerness, of gender identity, and many others. But that’s not really where I’m going with this one tonight. No, I think my only real purpose in musing about this stuff right now is to preface a brief comment about introversion and the pleasures of being alone. As a confirmed multivert, I feel like most of what I write about reflects questions of relationship and community, but tonight, I just wanted to reflect a bit on solitude.

I don’t have a brilliant point to make, really. I just want to put it out there that solitude can be a rich, deep, fulfilling experience. It can feed us and help keep us whole. It doesn’t have to be about the rejection of friends, partners, communities; it doesn’t have to call to mind visions of crazy old cat ladies or fears about the inability to hold onto a relationship. Solitude – whether chosen or imposed – can simply be about reveling in being alone.

With that in mind, I’m going to list off a few of the things I enjoy doing alone, and why.

1. A long, hot shower. It’s a routine I’ve perfected over the past fifteen years. I close the bathroom door because I like the room steamy, but I leave it open about two inches so that I can still breathe. I light two or three candles, and the smell of the match when blown out always sets the tone for me. The lights go off; the room is lit only with dim gold. I strip, toss the dirty clothes in a pile and lay the clean ones down nicely. I turn on the water and test the stream until it’s perfect. I pull the handle, and the shower bursts to life. I step in and let the water sluice down my body. It coaxes the tension out of my shoulders, rinses the layer of outdoor grime off my skin, gradually warms me from the core. I pick the scent that fits my mood best and use a loofah to scrub all my skin, like a delicious back scratch that always hits exactly the right place. Sometimes I wash my hair, digging my fingers into my scalp. Sometimes I shave, and enjoy the meticulous process of razor against curve, the ensuing slickness of smooth skin, another layer peeled away. Sometimes I just stand there and let the water take me where it wants.

I’ve been taking this shower once a day for a long time. When I lived with my parents, it was one of the only ways to guarantee some privacy in a house with four kids and plenty of visitors. When I left home, I was poor for a really long time, and it was one of the only affordable luxuries available to me. And today, the routine is comforting in its familiarity.

2. Work. It’s me and my computer screen and a keyboard. I know what needs to get done, and I do it thoroughly and then I check the job off my list when I’m done. It’s a wonderfully satisfying experience. Task, effort, accomplishment. My fingers move quickly on the keys; words are born, they shift places, text is tightened up and loosened and combed and massaged. A piece that came to me in French flows out in English, with discrepancies corrected and formatting smoothed and vocabulary checked. I make sure the whole thing reads like an original, not a translation – no awkward turns of phrase or clunky sentence formulations. A piece that came to me messy comes out clean. I groom it, style it, polish the rough bits and fill in the cracks. Sometimes I leave questions, clearly colour-coded so the author can fill in the missing links. A piece that comes to me as an idea spills out of my head into concrete form, form that others can then take up and read and react to, critique and edit and move around. A conversation in silence.

I’m not sure if it truly counts as solitude when in fact the work I do is profoundly about communication, which necessarily implies the participation of others. But when I’m sifting through words and tapping on keys alone at my computer, usually in the middle of the night while the world around me sleeps, the silence and speed and focus of my work, with nary a fellow human being in sight, never fails to energize my mind.

3. Weight-lifting. I breathe, feel my heart beat. I position myself. Body lined up correctly, stable, focused. I wrap my hands around a bar, nestling the smooth, cool metal shape of it in the meaty parts of my palms, making sure that it’s not pinching my skin or resting on a knuckle. I lift. The weight resists my efforts and causes me to be acutely aware of the muscles that are working to make it move despite its stubbornness. Do they feel right? Is everything aligned? Slow, deliberate, controlled. Weight lifting, for me, is never fast. I don’t swing or grunt. I breathe and pull or push, same count every time. First rep, the body’s getting used to the sensation. Second, third, fourth, it’s a crescendo of strength. By the last one the muscle is tight, burning a bit, maybe beginning to shake. The stress causes a slight surge in the heartbeat, and the out-breath is longer and deeper when I rest the weight carefully back where it comes from. I breathe a few more times, stretch the muscle, move around. Second set. I start over again.

Weight-lifting makes me feel strong. It shows me what my body is capable of, and I am sometimes pleasantly surprised.  It shows me where I am still flawed, where I can grow or develop, where I am weak. But the weights don’t judge; they just give me the facts. Your triceps are stronger than your biceps. Your shoulder pinches just so when you move like that, be careful, you might hurt it. One inch further forward, there, that’s better. This move, you just can’t do. That one, you are strong and solid. The precision of it, the acute awareness, the intense and pointed physical effort, all bring me into a slightly floaty place where I’m not really thinking anymore, except through blood and tissue and breath and bone. In some ways weight lifting is my connection to the divine.

4. Reading. Thick book. Smells good – freshly printed ink, or musty older paper, or anything in between. A topic that engages my mind. Usually, first, I’ll put some music on. Some sweet mellow jazz, or Latin music, or something old that sets a mood rather than being the focus of attention. I sit in the reading chair, the brown one that’s both firm and soft, that supports my body but lets me relax. Within easy reach are a snack – rice chips, fruit, crunchy veggies, nuts – and a drink, water or warm tea or maybe wine. A blanket if I’m chilled. A lamp if night has fallen. I’ve already gone pee, checked my e-mail, talked on the phone – whatever might have been about to interrupt me is taken care of. I open the book and I forget that time exists. Five or ten pages go by, and I’m still aware of my surroundings. But the good part begins when it all starts to flow. I forget page counts and deadlines. I’m no longer thinking about the things I need to get done later. My mind is intent on the story – fictional or otherwise – that’s unfolding in front of me, and the book itself isn’t even really the point anymore. It has transformed from a brick of bound paper into a glass full of knowledge, and I tip it and pour it directly into my mind. The rest stops mattering. Hours slip away. Eventually I stop, but even when the cover is closed, I’m fuller than I was before.

5. Walking in the desert. I rarely get to do this at all, let alone completely alone, but the emotional experience of the desert is one that’s so profoundly about solitude that it almost doesn’t matter that I usually have company. It’s about a stark landscape, flat or craggy, sand or rock, no great towering trees or flowing rushing water. Silence, wind, hardness. It’s a lonely kind of beauty, an emptiness that speaks volumes. No protection, no place to hide, just sky and earth and dryness. Yes, deserts are in many ways teeming with life, and I can enjoy that too. But the thing I love so much about deserts, crave about them perhaps, is their bluntness, their sharpness, their lack of distraction. Whether it’s the perfectly flat expanse of sand that rises into a blur of dust against the sunset at Burning Man, or the craggy, bright-red alien landscape of Red Rock Desert in Nevada, the desert reminds me every time that lushness is not necessary for beauty, that absence can be as satisfying as presence, that silence sings, that the sun heats and darkness chills. The sheer simplicity of it all eases my mind.

And you? Introvert, extrovert, ambivert, multivert – what solitudes do you hold dear?

keeping it light November 20, 2009

Okay, it’s late, I’m tired, and I’m having a minor moment of celebrity-related amusement. So this will be my grand blog post of the night. Your turn to vote! Which one do you like better as a celebrity pseudo-representation of butch-femme D/s: Oprah and Ellen with some Christmas-light bondage, or classic kd and Cindy Crawford with a straight razor?

on not being naughty November 18, 2009

I got an e-mail from a reader recently who said of this blog, “I love that you dare to express your naughty side.” The reader was super sweet, and the e-mail was clearly written with kind intentions. But for some reason it left a funny taste in my mouth.

Lemme unpack this for a minute. I think it’s hitting the wrong note in a few spots – well, two at least.

The first is the idea that I am “daring” to express something about sex. I don’t really think that talking about sex is a daring thing to do – for me, that is. There’s no particular frisson in it for me, no real sense of risk. I mean, sure, in theory I could I end up with a stalker, or right-wing zealots could track down my address and throw a firebomb at my apartment. But really, I just don’t think most of the world is that crazy, at least not the ones anywhere near me. The whole reason I am able to write this blog and be open and public about the kinds of sexuality that work for me and other people in my communities is precisely that I’m in a privileged position that makes it relatively easy to do so. I’m educated, white, and a Canadian citizen; I have no kids that can be taken away from me, and I’m self-employed so there’s no job I could be fired from. My family either already disapproves of me or likes me just fine, depending which one of them you’re talking to, and me writing about this kind of thing isn’t going to change that. I don’t have any standing in a religious organization that might excommunicate me, or any partisan political affiliation that would crumble if they found out about what I do, and I am not a member of an ethnic or cultural community to which I feel any allegiance or to which I must retreat for safety from a racist world, and thus whose love and protection I can’t afford to risk should some of them happen to be close-minded. I have no heterosexual monogamous marriage to protect, no conservative friends I want to hang onto – I let them all go a long time ago. Really, I’m risking basically nothing by doing what I do. So where’s the daring?

Don’t get me wrong – I am very impassioned by this work. Sex intrigues me, inspires me, thrills me. I think about it, talk about it, read about it, learn about it, and, well, practice makes perfect, too. But it doesn’t feel like an act of daring. If anything, writing and teaching about sex feels like an act of blunt straightforwardness, an act of impatience with all the bullshit out there, a desire to cut to the chase and skip all the crap. I just couldn’t be bothered with all the beating around the bush that so many people do. It tires me and bores me. So instead, lookie here at my pet obsession! If you’re interested, read on. If you’re not, have a great day anyway. Meh.

I think the idea that it might be daring to do this relies on the idea that there’s something forbidden about it in the first place, that I might be bravely transgressing some norm in order to write about sexual politics. I suppose in some people’s worlds, that’s precisely the case. But in my world, it’s not. My community is made up of sex radicals. Hundreds, even thousands of them. I do not feel alone. In every city I visit, across various continents, I find more perverts and the queers, and we speak the same language. My acquaintances, friends, partners, lovers, are leatherfolk, sex workers, perverts, dykes and fags, butches and femmes and bois and gyrls, trans people, poly folks, pierced and tattooed freaks, students of sexuality, genderqueers, feminists, weirdos. They’re people who explore, who challenge themselves, who educate and are educated, who write, who teach, who fuck in public places, who do porn, who take photos of naked people, who write erotic stories, who swing floggers, who run leather events and lick boots and get excited about queer theory and know the difference between “intersex” and “transsexual.” And if they don’t do these things themselves, they sure hang out with a lot of people who do. So really, in my world, I’m not terribly unusual. It’s hard for me to see myself as “daring” anything when I’m surrounded by people who are in far less privileged positions than me but who still bravely live their lives in all their glorious unacceptability.

If I go a little deeper, I guess what I’m saying is that a statement about daring assumes that I’m invested in a social paradigm in which my sexuality would actually horrify people, and so it really would be an act of daring to brazenly talk about it. But I’m more like an athlete who comes out as gay after they’ve already won their medal – there’s just not much to lose. And while I’m sure many people out there might very well be horrified about my sexuality, their opinions don’t have any power over me because I have very little invested in their world.

The second piece of what bothers me about the reader’s statement comes from the idea that I have a “naughty side.” I don’t.

First of all I don’t really divide myself into “sides.” My sexuality is a pretty holistic thing; I don’t climb into a special Bad Girl outfit and do terrible things that I then dissociate from my reality and go back to being “the rest of me.” I’m a pervert and a queer through and through. I’m a pervert when I’m heating up lentil soup for dinner as much as when I’m driving needles into someone’s skin for the pleasure of seeing them bleed. I’m a queer when I’m brushing my teeth in the morning with pillow marks on my face and my hair all mashed up on the side of my head as much as when I’m dressed to the nines and making out with my butch and trans partners. There are no sides here. There is a big ol’ pervy queer poly whole.

And that whole is not “naughty.” No sirree. “Naughty” is what tittering schoolgirls do behind their parents’ backs, like smoking or kissing boys or sneaking a short skirt and a lipstick into their backpack. “Naughty” is what boys do with girlie magazines when they steal ‘em from the corner store along with a beer and a candy bar. “Naughty” is that thing that some married straight couples do that makes them feel all special and titillated and outside the norm, like, say, going to a sex shop and buying a mass-produced pre-packaged “Bondage for Beginners” kit, the one with the picture of the blonde with breast implants and too much lipstick on the package, like thousands of other similarly titillated straight married couples.

I don’t think I have a shred of “naughty” in me because, once again, I’m not invested in a social paradigm in which anything I do is forbidden, glamorous or disapproved of by some form of authority that actually holds any sway in my world such that keeping it secret is both exciting and necessary. Kissing women and trans people isn’t naughty to me any more than kissing one’s spouse is naughty to a heterosexual. Whipping someone isn’t naughty to me any more than reproductive married sex is naughty to a Catholic. In fact, most of what I do is dreadfully normal in my world. Which is not to say there’s no excitement or power or passion there – believe me, it’s there in spades. But what I do is not exciting or powerful or passionate because it’s cheeky and gasp-worthy and might upset the neighbours/parents/friends if they knew. There is no everyday paradigm that I get a kick out of transgressing, no secret I giggle about keeping. The thrill of my sexuality does not lie in its social unacceptability and in the self-importance of considering myself deliciously unusual. It simply lies in the depth of connection I experience via the intense methods of sexual encounter I prefer.

Sure, sex radicals and freaks might play with the idea of “naughty” in a scene once in a while – the nasty mommy disciplining the naughty schoolboi, for example. But when they’re finished playing, they revert to their everyday selves, which are probably something like “queer femme pro-domme and dis/ability activist” and “butch leather titleholder and philosophy student.” Or whatever. And even the sex radicals who are also soccer moms and lawyers and homeowners and experimental biologists and so forth aren’t generally invested in maintaining the status quo of heterosexual society; they just spend time with that status quo because it’s getting them somewhere, sort of like you might sit next to a stranger on a bus because you’re both heading north.

And sure, there might be a lot of forbidden stuff in my sexual practices. By no means am I trying to suggest that the whole world approves of what I do. It doesn’t. What I am saying is that I don’t find that lack of approval to be exciting. It’s just stupid and oppressive. I don’t eroticize it; I’d rather eliminate it.

So for all that I totally dig how this reader was trying to give me a compliment, I’m not sure I can accept it. I’m not daring to express my naughty side here. I’m just talking about my reality.