In many ways, some form of exhibitionism for being a bit peculiar was drilled into my brain. The eccentricity of Sierra Madre, 3 square miles with no electric spot lights in city limits has been documented in many “Bizarre Los Angeles” guides. If you consume American media, you have seen the streets where I live and undoubtedly the property where I went to high school. The classrooms were off to the side of the “Villa Del Sol Oro” which was a scaled model of a favored Italian villa that the original owner, a Tuberculosis doctor, had commissioned to be his office and his home. The basement was constructed to house medical equipment and state of the art refrigerators for medicines. It has one of the first electric elevators in the county. It went on forever in darkness; I got to go through it often as a child during Halloween when the whole villa was turned into a haunted mansion as a fundraiser and it was a doozy.

My freshmen year I got to be the source of the theatrics. The school had all of the classes, freshmen through senior, each take one of the main hallways on the 4 floors of the estate. The seniors got the basement. Clubs were offered the side rooms to transform into their own niche theme. I went with SADD because they got the medical grade kitchen and I was able to sway the vote to recreate a Bedlam clinic as a way to unnerve the patrons. We had teenage girls in hallow makeup, frizzed out hair, wandering in gowns. A sheet was hung up to show a silhouette of someone performing hydrotherapy the way the Victorians did best. We had straight jackets. We had other girls welcoming people in with a clipboard as doctors to welcome them for a tour of the facilities.

And people wonder why I’m kinky.

The 1956 Invasion Of The Body Snatchers was filmed in my hometown. The best shot of it is when the protagonists are looking out of a window into the town square where [spoiler alert] pods are being dispersed to the townsfolk for propagation and inevitable vegetable total takeover. The red scare was green when it was black and white. They used to screen the film in the summer at Canon park and the punchline was that everything looked the same. All of the buildings were the same and so were most of the businesses during my childhood. The gas station was the same and even carrying on in the same brand name. Back To The Future was a movie I watched to feel normal.

After the Victorians, the train tracks came to pieces as public transportation was lobbied against by car companies (“Sorry, wrong meeting.” -W. Hicks) and the town was mostly forgotten. Then in the 40s, 50s, and especially the 60s its canyons at the foot of a spectacular mountain were inhabited by the “Bohemian” crowd. Bikers, modern architects, poets, artists, and other free thinking and pot smoking hippies settled in and turned the canyon area of the city into something of a maze. The idea of fire is a real threat and a puzzle for firefighters to navigate every single time a call comes in because there have been horrific fires. I have seen my friends’ homes singed.

The 80s brought the republican yuppies who occupy the main area of the city. They kind of wrecked everything but brought in their own weirdness. The nuns at my Catholic school told me about a notorious cocaine dealer who was involved in the city council who used to sell to elementary school kids at the pepper tree (seen as a spry young tree in Body Snatchers) and caused something of a quiet scandal. In between the filming of Body Snatchers the tree had grown enormously but had also been struck by lightning creating a wide divide in the tree. Like I said, I watched Back To The Future to feel normal.

My house was right by two fantastic trail heads. My love of hiking was well-groomed by constant access to long and amazing trails. Oh, they went on and on and I explored them with camps and my dogs and friends frequently. There was always the ominous background of it all. One trail head is right near a monastery famous for its larger than life depictions of the Passion Of The Christ and a fire that touched down on my town and caused an evacuation of my school when we saw the flames from our 3rd grade windows touching down on the hills behind our homes and the helicopters dropping water, seemingly, to no avail. There were a lot of natural disasters. There was the Sierra Madre quake and the Northridge quake. I remember them in transformers exploding off into the horizon making green fireworks into a sky just before dawn and in my father’s hand holding a plate of fresh french toast that begin to quiver just before the boom of the quake hit the ground and rattled the glasses and the dishes in the cabinets around us up into their shelves and out into the room in a spray of glass.

Sometimes nature just flipped the fuck out.

I remember the rains after the fires in our hills because no more than maybe 300 yards from where I slept every night, a young boy my age and his father were caught in a flash flood and sudden debris flow through the canyon. There hasn’t been rain where we were that day and the other hikers who survived and shared their witness of the events and all spoke of the sudden horrible rumbling in the distance and the 5 seconds they had to immediately jump to the canyon walls and begin climbing for their lives and watching people sweep by and being unable to do anything about it. Their bodies were recovered under nearly 20 feet of mud where it all collected in a basin. We followed the news. Buried at 7 feet, a shoe from the boy who was exactly my age and went to a karate studio with one of my friends in the neighboring city.

By the age of 9, I had a very well-developed sense of respect for the fact that everything could be turned on your head in an instant. The earth could, and would, move and shake somewhere out of the blue. The hills could catch fire. You could be hiking peacefully and be hit by a moving train of mud, rocks, branches, and water. I had such humility, love, and respect for that mountain and the canyon. As I started to change from a child to a woman, I started to see the other natural disasters in the world of men. I could be walking peacefully down the street and someone with malicious intentions would have impeccable access to my body. All at once, like an earthquake or a flash flood, it could happen in a snap.

My school uniform was a hazard as far as my walk was concerned. It isn’t pornographic images of adult women wearing micro-school girl skirts and having sex in a roleplay that makes the uniform dangerous to the students who wear them authentically. What makes them dangerous are what they are in and of themselves: a clear marker for your age and how much control you have over your own life. People don’t attack children in school uniforms because they saw porn featuring adults or even adult women in pigtails. Between the ages of 9-15 I didn’t look at all like a grown women and there wasn’t anyone with a reasonable mind making and understandable mental switch.

I loved my walks and the serenity and space they gave me in between the world at home and school but there were the constant interruptions. There were the shouts from men saying things I didn’t understand cognitively but always gave me a stomach ache. There was my peer who was called over by a man sitting in a parked car and as soon as she saw him openly masturbating in the driver’s seat. He was an aggressive flasher. She said that it was so far from what she expected that she instantly vomited and most of it landed on her flasher through the window. Even years later, this memory is shrouded for her with embarrassment that she “couldn’t hold her stomach down.” I cannot described the sadness I feel at her palpable sense of having handled it wrong and the sense she had that it was her duty to hold her head high and keep walking unaffected by what had occurred.

There was the older man who always asked me to come play with his puppy in the garage, everyday, until I finally started going out of my way on my route just to avoid him. The times when joggers or dog walkers would impose themselves onto my walks as if they were entitled to stroll with me until I arrived at school. At first I was worried that they were doing this to figure out where I went to school until I realized that it didn’t matter if they followed me there or not: every school has their own set of colors clearly identifying “their” students. Everyone already knew where I was going at 6:30AM and they knew exactly what time the bell was going to ring. In order to be a young girl walking to school in a uniform, you have to start thinking like James Bond. You have to vary your routes, fuck with your schedule, avoid routine, and constantly scan the terrain and look for exits.

No one really talks to you clearly about this because no one wants to talk about why you really need to know any of it. When I got into early feminist reading, I did consider the notion that we “sexualize” the school girl uniform through porn but the truth is so much uglier than that. It isn’t porn that makes the uniform dangerous: it’s the fact that a child is a perfect victim in our society. It isn’t the adult sexual use of a uniform that puts these ideas into someone’s head, it’s the advertisement that you are so very young and have been well-trained to be polite and to comply with what adults say.

I remember my freshmen year of high school. It was fall and I was half-way into my return walk home. I was climbing a steep hill and had been lost in my thoughts until a white truck drove past me and the driver stared intently as I walked. I was used to the drive-by gazers, I was used to the things people would holler, but something about the way he watched me sent shivers down my spine and ripped me out of my day dreams. I was at the halfway point between school and home. It was no-man’s land and I felt like a ground rodent in an open field in a nature documentary as a hawk swooped overhead in predatory circles. I hoped that he wouldn’t come back but I hadn’t ever felt abject fear of an adult like that ever in my life.

5 minutes went by and I could see the canyon opening closer in my vision as I got closer to my house with the family German Shepherd and the locking doors and some sense of safety without the total exposure I felt on the road. I heard the sound of his engine before I saw him. It was as if my brain instantly memorized the unique buzz and hum of his truck as entirely distinct from all others. Every engine is unique but it takes something special for us to pay attention to the micro-differences. He drove by me a second time with the same fixed gaze on me as I walked. Every hair on my neck stood on end. I didn’t want to be there, I didn’t have weapons, I didn’t know what to do.

So I crossed to the other side of the street to ride up against traffic. The idea of a car coming up from behind me seemed like too much of a risk. I would be safer if someone came at my from the front rather than swooping up from behind. I came to the top of the hill where a left turn put you just a hop, skip, and a jump from the trail head into the open wilderness of the mountain canyon. A right turn and just 7 more minutes of walking would have me safe behind my doors. That’s when the truck came back, crossing onto the wrong side of the street with the car pointed right at me. The door was already ajar, his hand was out the window. I could hear him accelerate and not only was he aiming at me, his car was pointed right in the direction of the trail ahead.

My backpack! I felt instantly aware of not just its weight on my back but the fact that in order to distribute its weight I had supportive buckles across my chest and waist. Suddenly, it felt like a massive liability. It would have been easy to reach out and grab any of its loose straps or handles on the back and drag me the short distance into the mouth of the wilderness. I knew that canyon so well and I loved all of the life that flourished inside of it but I knew that it also had the smell of death it in it. Most canyon spaces near urban areas serve as body dumps. When a large search starts for one special missing victim with a team of people dedicated to their recovery, police will usually uncover human remains that do not match the person they are seeking. I knew that I had to lose the backpack and my fingers raced to the clasps as I literally jumped and rolled into the front yard of a stranger and ran to their door for help.

When he missed me, the driver, whose face I still remember like a photograph, corrected his path and sped off quickly away from me and the area with a sense of finality that made me breathe with relief especially when I discovered that no one was answering the front door where I was shouting for help. I walked to my backpack with a sense that I would sooner burn it and everything inside than wear it again but I knew the books were expensive and I knew that everyone would just yell at me. I picked it up and I walked home picking up anything in my path that resembled an effective weapon. I called my parents and I called the police.

Everyone, including myself, said that he was probably just trying to scare me. I still did my sketch and described him in vague ways even though his face seemed so familiar in my brain. It was hard to actually articulate how he looked and the most helpful thing about the software is the ability to change the combinations until it looks right. I did my best but my sketch didn’t look like him. He was white, wore thin glasses, and had blue eyes. I described him as being “just older than college” because he looked to be late 20s, early 30s. Today, that’s my dating range. To my 13-year-old perspective, he was a grownup but a youngish grownup. Definitely not a peer. We all spoke about it as if it were just a really mean prank but there was an edginess around all of the adults including the police and the idea that they weren’t telling me something that I felt entitled to know.

I wasn’t allowed to talk to or from school for awhile and this pissed me off because it was more of a punishment for me than him. There were always hazards in the road, always things to be aware of, and always a hint of danger when I was on my own but the benefit of having my space and independence outweighed those risks every time. I felt claustrophobic at home and school. Danger was something deeply intense and brought mind-blowing fear with it but it was fleeting. It happened once and awhile. I knew the difference between someone sexualizing me from a distance and someone who wanted to make contact. There is a gaze that a pest possesses that is distinct from the gaze of a hungry predator. There is the smile and the nod from someone who thinks you’re attractive that puts a happy kick in your step and there is the smile and the nod that makes you feel violated. Consciously, it’s hard to articulate but the gut feeling comes from a brain making constant micro-assessments of every environment we walk into.

Kind of like the police sketch, I cannot articulate the difference between the driver who makes me want to throw my finger out and yell right back and the one who feels like a punch to the gut telling me to run. This is largely credited to whether or not my brain has conducted a threat assessment. Most of the time, it isn’t someone who is going to rape and murder you but all threats must be assessed because if this is the case you have maybe a split second to make the decision that will save your life whether they come from humans, animals, or the inanimate but living world. When we hear a loud noise, even without consciously thinking through the steps our brains are scouring the database looking for the closest match. Sometimes you can do everything right and still doesn’t matter because there isn’t enough time to react.

When I hike in canyons, every distant rumble gives me pause. I know that there is a sound that has been described to me as wholly unearthly. Given that a flash flood is entirely natural, the unique quality of sound must come from the eerie music that the brain plays when you are now face-to-face with the edge. What makes that sound so different, it evokes a sense of urgent action?

My strange little town is mostly quiet, mostly safe, mostly carefree but when things get weird they get weird fast. What made me hate my school girl skirt was how different the world looked when I was wearing it. From the moment when I would wake up in the morning and fall into the routine of wearing this, wearing that, going through the list and playing each choice up against the rules. You’re not creative in your space, you can only be creative within theirs and ours was exceptionally cramped. I got demerits for non-white shoelaces and once for wearing knee-high stockings that sat higher than my knee by an inch. Every detail was a reminder: you are not in charge of yourself. People interacted with me differently than on weekends when I wore jeans, boots, and ball caps. I felt comfortable, free to move, and I didn’t stick out like the picture of a little girl who does what she is told.

I wanted to dress in a way that was logical for my needs, context, and motivations. A knee jerk adolescent compulsion to wear rebellious punk-rock duds does not totally account for the entire situation. I lived at the foothills of a mountain. Black bears once tried to break into my home. I saw coyotes on my way to school in the morning. Mountain lions were being tranquilized and sent to higher grounds and I was already proud of the number of times that I was the first one to spot the rattle snake. In this setting, penny loafers and a grey pleated wool skirt are kind of fucking stupid.

The pope knows for a fact that the streets are not equally safe for everyone to walk around. He gets carted around in a cart with bulletproof glass, so I think he’s a fucking asshole for sending me off to my education wearing pleats in the streets. The dangers of being a girl on the streets don’t come from porn. You could evaporate every single last image of someone getting fucked in a school girl skirt and it won’t change one damn thing about the fact that I was still a girl and girls aren’t afforded voices or autonomy in our culture.

Most people watching adults getting fucked in school girl skirts are doing so because they enjoy watching and knowing that the people involved are adults getting fucked in school girl skirts. What made my skirt different at 13 than 27 is decision making power. At 13 I had no choice regarding any detail of the skirt. Not the shape, model, size, or accessorizing. It advertised where I was going or coming from and the school would actually punish you for things you were spotted or reported to be doing in your uniform outside of school hours which was a known tool for all of the adults in the city. If you wanted to jack any of us up, you could have said that you saw us smoking cigarettes by the canyon in our skirts and be pretty confident we would be stuck after school in detention for it. Denying it wouldn’t get you anywhere unless you had a parent who would advocate for you in the office.

The uniform was a reminder that I had no control over my context. If there was any protection shining down on me that day with the car it was the fact that I couldn’t get enough time to myself walking and wandering and I loved climbing those canyon and mountain trails with my dog and was so entirely aware of the fact that you could disappear into those woods and make it so no one found you for a long fucking time. I am one of those people who gets my personal energy from long periods of time alone. I am a performer but I am very much an introvert. Not all those who wander are lost and without my time to wander I will become quite mentally lost.

For the longest time, I was drawn to the BDSM moniker of “female dominant” because I’ve always had a strong preference for being the one to instigate a sexual encounter. I experience more gratification and pleasure when I pick someone up. I’ve had fun when someone has successfully seduced me but being chosen for someone always puts me on the kind of guard that makes it hard for me to fully relax and put down my hair. I do not feel specialer, prettier, or smarter when I am approached by a man for flirting or for sex. I feel more safe when I go to the individual that I find myself attracted to and get to determine the context. I am left with fewer questions as to whether the man behind the smile is with me because he is attracted to me or if he is targeting me.

I feel less and less connected to a strong identification with any particular sexual role beyond the fact that I have a creative and constantly reeling mind full of images, ideas, and fantasies. I am, during sex, what I need to be in order to get off and the position is less crucial to the proceedings. In the constant quest for new, I am less aroused by ritual and more by spontaneity. In many ways I seek vocabulary for kinkiness that represents the ways I identify with queerness. What I do know is that I like having sex with people I approach who are keen and positively responsive to the notion of happy fun sexy times with me at a time and place of my choosing when our interactions commence.

I speak about my interactions with men because my queerer interactions play out a bit differently than sitting in a straight bar and being approached by presumably straight cisgender strange men. As a whole, I have more fun with male partners who do give me plenty of room and the space to be the actor in regards to sex rather than the reactor. I don’t think that this is an inherently “dominant” feature because I don’t really know what I’ll be into in the immediate context of the sexual hyperspace will be in that moment. Maybe I’ll fuck their ass, maybe they’ll fuck mine. Until we start talking I don’t wholly know where the strongest overlap between interests and proclivities will fall. What I want to do during sex depends a whole lot on how my day went and how my body is feeling. Whatever is I wind up doing, I will experience more gratification if I have decision making power on the context.

I’ve been drawn to urbanity with close proximity to wilderness through the course of my life. I choose the campus of UC Santa Cruz pretty much based on geography alone. I knew that I wanted to attend a University of California campus and so far as an undergrad academic experience in literature, the discipline I knew I would study from pretty much the age of 12, would be pretty comparable down the line. Lucky me, Santa Cruz was still the weirdo campus of the system with some deep progressive holdouts still clinging to life. I studied with amazing people who changed my paradigms and I did so in a redwood forest by the beach.

Maybe it won’t work for everyone, but if you’re encountering dense philosophical texts for the first time I highly recommend scaling a 60 foot redwood tree to the top and reading it in the sunlight and just thinking about what you read as you watch the sun set into the ocean. It really helped tie things together for me and I’m pretty woo-woo averse. I crave urbanity and concrete by day and total wild isolation at night. I need the museums, the noises, the crowded buses, conversations happening in languages I don’t understand, the most insane thing you ever saw followed by the smartest thing you ever heard followed by someone so sexy it takes your breath away. Sign me up. Sign me up for street food, it’s better than restaurant food, stop worrying about your Purell and eat something grilled on a street corner. At least you can see the kitchen and how many fucked up videos from Applebees kitchen to see that suburbia is evil and trying to kill us.

I’m also pretty happy in the middle of nowhere in the wilderness. Both of these spaces have their dangers. There are bears, mountain lions, and the kind of fucked up serial killers that inspire movies potentially lurking off in the distance. These things happen. However, virtually every single study shows that rape, abuse and assault to children happens predominantly by  people they know. It is more dangerous to a predator to take an unknown child off the street than it is to abuse one that they see everyday. When shit happens, statistically speaking, it’s somewhere and with someone who you know. It’s not to say that I’m safe in hiking out in the mountains but statistically speaking I’m way safer there than I am as a teenager going to high school. Going to high school is probably one of the most hazardous occupations we’ve ever invented.

Wearing a school girl uniform made me feel more vulnerable because of how clearly it marked me as an easy target from far away. Jeans, boots, and a sweatshirt compelled someone to get close enough to me that I could see them but the ill-fashioned skirt, pink blouse, and sweater set me off as vulnerable from an easy distance. I wasn’t dressed to respond to the repeated threats in my context. The forced feminization of the uniform felt like enforced vulnerability.

Porn isn’t in the wrong for using the school girl uniform, schools are already forcing and establishing the dominance pecking order by establishing a school girl uniform. That’s some non-consensual D/s shit and it’s much more appropriate to do between two consenting adults. Consensual outlets for self-aware control freaks, that is my sexual harm reduction method. Your brain is the best sex toy you will ever own and part of fighting oppression is looking into yourself and how it holds you back and how to participate in it. When you eroticize something, you pull it from that context and begin to engage with it in a way that moves towards more awareness. Just playacting doesn’t create the conscious awareness, thinking about why and the context with which you have those feelings is a separate and long process. At the very least, the images jump to the forefront of your brain in a place where you cannot and will not ignore them completely.

So what’s the word for that sexual identity?

I grew up at the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains in a small and terribly archaic anomaly in Los Angeles County: a city only 3 square miles in size with no electric stop lights within the boundaries of the town, a life-size nativity prominently displayed on city property in the middle of the city square, a city wide dedication to the little league team, an all volunteer fire department, and one of the smallest and still 100% volunteer powered float contributors to the world-renowned Tournament of Roses Parade.

There is something so distinctly American about the Tournament of Roses Parade. On New Years Day (unless it’s a Sunday in which the festivities proper are held until the 2nd) there is the Rose Bowl football game which is preceded by an egregious display of wealth, prominence, and privilege in the form of a parade in which the floats must be 100% covered in organic matter presided over by the Rose Queen and her attending Rose Princesses.

The Rose Court ladies must be students in the Pasadena school district as high school seniors or in the first year at Pasadena City College. It used to be that many young women from other cities would actually enroll at P.C.C. just for the chance to try out for the Rose Court and the chance to reign for the period of one year of American Aristocracy. It is quite an honor; the young ladies are more or less passed from their classes due to the hectic schedule of being a reigning queen or princess. There are endless charity events to attend and the ladies spend a great deal of time at the gorgeous ivory-white Victorian mansion headquarters for the Tournament Of Roses. They are given a wardrobe, etiquette classes, makeup teams, lessons in elocution, and every other element of training to articulate fine breeding.

They are given constant gifts and shuttled around by a staff of knights in white minivans with the rose emblem prominently displayed. Young children bask in their presence and they all have a perfect smile. Now, it used to be that the rose court matched the paint on the mansion and the minivans but there have been great efforts to include women of color. Taking a cue from Mattel, the court is the very definition of mainstream beauty and strikingly similar physiques and flashy white smiles under rhinestone tiaras.

The auditions are held annually at the mansion early on in the fall. Hundreds of anxious young ladies line up around the block in their prettiest outfits practicing their best smiles and rehearsing what they’ll say in the allotted 20 seconds they would stand before the panel of judges who would smile the whole time and thank them kindly for coming out that day.

In the fall of 2002, I was standing in that line. My motives were slightly different and although it is true that it was my mother who encouraged me to attend and stood at my side, it really doesn’t play out the way most people imagine it would go. We both had the same derision for the beauty standards and neither I nor she had any illusion I was going to picked to be part of the court. We were there together purely to enter ground zero of this bizarre ritual. We wanted to peer inside the mansion, we wanted to see these people behind this wholly contrived affair and the incredible amount of money poured into it.

Seriously: this parade has a fucking budget and a prestige that I will never understand. As a small child, I had my city pride in the fact that unlike everyone else in this stupid fucking parade we never hired designers, contractors, engineers, floral specialists, or anything. Children submitted designs, people voted, and then whoever stepped up to lend a hand to build thing showed up at the big warehouse behind the little league fields to work. At 9 years old, I loved the lack of rules governing the operation especially around the issue of child safety in a workplace involving serious risk to life and limb.

I mentioned that everything had to be covered in organic matter. Unless it’s a moving part, you have to stick down flowers, seeds, leaves, rice, or something that grows from the ground onto the exterior. It’s a huge waste of resources and a lot of what is used is wholly edible. In a city where there are people who are homeless, it’s really a cruel joke that millions of dollars are spent cultivating food that will be applied to the side of a 50 foot tall moving nutcracker that sings and has people dressed as elves and bears dancing at the bottom.

At 9 years old, the fact that the foreman on the project told me I could glue corn husks onto the bottom of our larger than life train car with moving wheels by sliding underneath the engine of it all and its amateur construction while it was actively being tested for safety and functionality was a total delight to me. Even at that age I knew I was embarking on a task that was totally and utterly unsafe and situation that no sane adult should ever recommend. The foreman saw only thing: the whole fucking float had to be covered in organic matter and someone had forgotten to get the part underneath the engine that was technically considered in the judging and only a 9 year old would be small enough to get in there now. So I was handed a tray of some seriously fun glue, a bunch of corn husks that I myself had been ironing for hours, and scrunched underneath the hulking, moving, and dangerous iron beast with a smile on my face.

Those are the moments I remember fondly about the tournament of roses. Then again, there was a certain magical bewilderment I always had when thousands of people camped out on the streets of the parade route on New Year’s Eve just to get a good spot to see the parade. Really, it wouldn’t have been too terribly hard for me to have biked out to see this prestigious event and I could not wrap my head around the fact that it was prestigious purely because so many people watched it.

But back to the day of the day of the audition.

My mother and I stood in line with a distinct feeling of otherness and a serious unfamiliarity of how to play this situation as mother daughter. The behavior of the fray did not match our own and I could see that my Mom was struggling for the right way to be supportive despite the fact this whole thing was so clearly stupid and overtly in opposition to the notion that a woman could be a valuable for a brain and not just a mile long white flashy smile and ability to wear a tiara well. I had no idea how to dress for the occasion. “Femininity” was a concept that also baffled me. I had attended my first high school in drag because I literally had no idea where to begin when it came to dressing like a girl. It was obvious that this was an assessment of how well we did by age in balancing girlhood and womanhood.

I hadn’t come into with any intention or desire to win but as I got closer to the front it just made me feel sick to actually go through the process of certain rejection. It didn’t matter why I was there, those assholes with the minivans–no matter how fucking polite–were the ones who made the decisions about which young lady was princess material and who wasn’t. I could be smarmy, I could be witty, I could bitchy, I could be smart as a whip. I could say whatever the fuck I wanted but when it was my turn it wouldn’t amount to anything more than humiliation because they had everything. When it was my turn, I mumbled something along the lines of being there “because it was Pasadena,” and then walking off to the side room for my complimentary portrait holding a massive bouquet or crisp beautiful roses.

I felt like I was in a daze. Until the flashes from the portraits being taken of the cattle line with our numbers pinned onto our shoulders so the judges could remember what we looked like, I just floated through the space locked entirely into my head. I was wearing an orange skirt with even brighter orange polka dots and a vermilion blouse on top with small black heels on my feet from Payless. I looked like the surface and it matched my perspective on everything.

Probably 85% percent of the line is there gunning for the gold. Then you have the other 15% split along more unique motives. One young woman showed up in a Marlene Dietrich tuxedo ensemble, flipped the judges the bird, yelled, “Fuck the patriarchy!” and then strolled off into the portrait room. The judges didn’t even flinch; just smiled their polite smile, thanked her for coming out, and waved her goodbye.

I could have loved her but there was no way for me to get past the crowd to chat with her and then I lost her entirely in the fray. Still I watched and the way that even with the courage she had that I lacked I could still see the lonely hollow in her eyes that crawled back into her own mind just as mine had when I was standing back at her end of the line. My eyes also perked up when I saw a young man with the physique of a quarterback enter the room in deliberately horrible drag; an ill-fitting sequin dress and cheap blonde wig hanging haphazardly from his head.

I watched him and felt instantly the same way that I felt the first time I saw Victor/Victoria. It was sudden and deep envy of men in feminine attire. It’s where my mind always goes when I see pictures of Weimar Berlin. Now this young fellow was obviously putting on a satire but his body posture was otherwise quiet and unassuming. He was very polite and kept mostly to himself never once obviously lingering on the bodies of the women in cocktail dresses and heels standing everywhere around him. I didn’t lose him in the crowd and felt compelled to make his acquaintance when we were spit out into the exit parlor with information about the “Rose Ball” danced hosted for anyone and everyone who tried out for the Tournament Of Roses. It was well-known as the “loser’s ball” and represented a major portion of everyone’s purpose in being at the mansion that day.

It was just like prom but infinitely more elegant and moreover it was 100% free for anyone who came out to the audition and one guest of their choosing. Unlike a high school, they had a public relations board and a lot of market research into anything and everything they did. This is a profitable enterprise. There were no demands on gender or heterosexual conformity. They were 100% hands off. Additionally, they didn’t put us through the horrific rigamorale of drug dogs and metal detectors outside of the dances we were used to attending. They didn’t search our bags, they didn’t police our outfits, they had lots of security to handle any problems but otherwise kept their hands off and let us celebrate our loserdom in decadence.

When I caught up to the young man in drag, I asked him with a smile why he came out. He told me that he and his girlfriend were both pretty broke and wouldn’t be able to afford the $100 tickets to their prom but that this dance would be an even better substitution. She had been looking forward to dressing up and having a night on the town just like the movies had always depicted and she was going to be auditioning herself just for the dance tickets. As fate would have it, she had come down with food poisoning and was at home vomiting. “I figured that if it was important to her, she shouldn’t have to lose out because of that. I guess you’re supposed to wear a dress for the audition so I grabbed one from my mom’s closet.”

I don’t remember the name of this individual and but a decade later, here from this blog, I really wish the best for this guy wherever he is. I got a sense that he was a class act when I was 17 but here I am at 27 and his participation in my memory of that event gives me hope that even at ground zero of some fucked up gender problems there were still teenagers out there playing with gender and questioning the event.

Looking at the blogs, twitter accounts, and tumblrs of young queer and trans activists I get the sense that those auditions for the Tournament of Roses are going to get pretty fucking interesting in the coming years. This is an institution that needs to be challenged and taken down by the youth it caters and markets itself to and I have hopes that this will happen. There’s more and more information and resources available to those asking questions. I was there at the dawn of it but I smile at what there is now and I delight when high schoolers get rowdy and uppity about gender bullshit.

How much longer are people going to keep smiling at the beauty of this meaningless, wasteful, and humiliating tradition? The “Doo-Dah Parade” has been a time honored counter-culture response to the Rose Parade. It’s very dada-esque in many regards and famous for the fact that the crowd was once encouraged to throw tortillas at the people in the parade as a commentary on wasting food. This has fallen out of popularity because of waste and because there was something of a serious tortilla injury at some point. Now you’re more likely to see people in the Hibachi Grill Marching Band preparing hotdogs, wrapping them in tin foil, and launching them from constructed “hot dog bazookas” and firing them for safe consumption into the crowd.

Build a hot dog bazooka, feed the people, and rather than a rose court have a contingent of the “dead rose queens” in zombie makeup and sashes from yesteryear. Make fun of the institutions, have a few laughs. Everyone loves a parade and the Doo-Dah is an open call to anyone with an idea. You show up in the morning with your bizarre performance art and get in the line. The “Invisible Man Marching Band” led by one man with a bandaged body below a suit and sunglasses waving a baton, blowing a whistle, and standing in front of a 30 foot gap leading his brigade. A group of people under the banner, “The Bastard Sons Of Lee Marvin” smoke cigars and get surly walking together as a group. You could see anything, really, and I think it’s much more fun than the Rose Parade any day.

When I was a child, choosing a Halloween pumpkin was a very big deal to me. It involved all kinds of dedicated scrutiny and I felt a certain kinship with the strange pumpkins. I fretted about their fate and worried they would be discarded and unchosen for not possessing the popular characteristics of a “good” Halloween pumpkin. I had the personality of a budding social worker dedicated to the gourds that fell between the cracks. I’m sure it comes to no surprise that all of my pets have been shelter rescues.

Strange pumpkins still fascinate me. It’s humbling to think of the incredible array of diversity in a single species of plant. We place markers at certain points to differentiate between the varieties but the contents in each group defy homogeneity. There is something just a little different about each one and that thought is humbling. When it comes to writing, I sometimes feel complacent under the notion that there is nothing new under the sun and at the everything old will be “in” again in the future. Then I step into a pumpkin field or look at the faces of people in a crowd and I remember that those statements are untrue. There are all kinds of brand new things popping up under the sun every day.

We went to a field that had a holiday closing out sale: an entire wheelbarrow full of pumpkins for $25. Between my hours of dedicated Jenga play and Ned’s background in physics, we managed to get a lot of pumpkins balanced in the wheelbarrow and I began to think of ways to carve and then ultimately cook them. Last year I made several pumpkin dishes from our trip to the grocery store ranging from pies, to curries, breads, cakes, and smoothies. Homemade pumpkin pie is delicious when the pumpkin is fresh and it isn’t terribly difficult to prepare. You can either boil or bake portions of the pumpkin and then use and ice cream scooper to get the fruit. Then blend!

Folsom is also a fan of pumpkins and when not carefully watched will steal jack o’lanterns for munching. She enjoys baked mashed pumpkin mixed into her food so naturally we had to bring her along for the expedition to acquire some. She’s still a young dog who can’t get enough of long hikes and walks and time playing with other dogs. She’s incredibly curious and likes to roll things by nudging them with her nose and paws. She craves new stimulation just as much as I do so I was happy to bring her along for the day.

Although there has been a severe lash back against sexy costumes, they are still incredibly common among the 20something crowd. Although some costumes are unforgivably and blatantly racist and must be called out as such, I have no urge to rush out and tell women not to dress as sexually provocative nor men to dress as sexually silly because the popularity of these costumes is emerging from a context of very enforced abstinence education. On Halloween you can a manifestation of our year’s ambivalence, a peculiar harvest of sexuality. Human sexuality is a giant sound mix board. We all exist on a sliding scale of auditory potential and qualities that can be adjusted from mute to blaring. In a sexually healthy culture, we would all be in charge of our own mix boards. Halloween is a night when people who have been told to play inaudible sexual music all throughout the year are given permission, for one night, to play.

I spend most of my year being sexually provocative and creating wild and elaborate costumes. I don’t have the urgency to do the same for Halloween. I associate the endeavor with work and on holidays I want to celebrate and rejuvenate. Massive crowds of people take a toll on my energy and I am fueled by time alone or with small intimate groups. The idea of going out on the town in an elaborate get up, to fight my way to the bartender, and to walk through a crowded room while spilling my expensive cocktail everywhere just isn’t my idea of relaxing recreation. For Halloween I wanted my pumpkins and a few friends over for a meal to see my new apartment and the decorations I put out in the yard. 16 carved pumpkins and a makeshift cemetery with flying bats greeted them at the door.

Sometimes in the hustle and bustle of a holiday, it’s easy to forget that you can celebrate as much or as little as you choose. Despite the hype, it’s not compulsory to go out and do anything at all.  I am glad that those who are fueled by large groups of people can go out to big and loud parties and have fun. People should have fun, life is so very short and it should be filled with that which we find pleasurable. Earlier in the month, Ned and I performed at such a party. Performing is often the best way for me to personally attend a party. I can gaze out at the crowd and my time on stage always feel electric and powerful. Then I can retreat to the relative quiet of the green room for some breathing room and peace.

I suppose that this year I got the best of both worlds. I got some wild and crazy stage time as a blood thirsty vampire queen and got to knock my beloved around on stage a bit and destroy an old thrift shop suit. Then, on Halloween itself, I celebrated with an intimate evening inside my own home. That’s the nice thing about having access to the city and to the country I suppose. It’s good to have a place and a way to enjoy those last remaining warm evenings before the chill and the endless onslaught of repetitive carols that come during the winter.

It was a busy year for me filled with lots of achievements and adjustments. Our puppy grew up from a small and easy to carry fluff into her full grown lab/mastiff frame. I grew up with dogs and I’m happy to finally have one in my life again. It felt as though something snapped into place when we adopted her. I’m endeared to my cats but they don’t want to go backpacking with me in the mountains.

We moved out of our indoor apartment to something with a yard and plenty of space in September. I’m still unpacking my boxes and recalibrating normal for myself but I got that one in under the wire. Ned constantly impresses me with the way that he steps up to the game and works hard with me to build the kind of home that we want together.

In the spring, we decided to start working on Meet The Mayhems and the site may have been rolled out early but it’s sprouting and a fun project. The PSIgasm has been in development for awhile it made its piblic debut in workshops and at the Arse Elektronika festival where we took home a “Golden Kleene” award for sex machines, orgasmotrons and teledildonics. It’s been a productive year for the Mayhems and we have no plans to slow down any time soon.

Every year has its ups and downs and course. We also fielded the pornwikileaks fiasco which had a bit of a lengthy aftermath for me. I’ve joined the board of the Adult Performers Association board to help disseminate information, education, and resources about sex education and HIV/STI prevention. I don’t want something like PWL to ever happen again. The only way to do this is to reduce stigma, lobby for ways to help protect our privacy, and empower performers by connecting them with resources to help manage their finances and taxes, personal health and wellness, and communication skills.

I have also been exploring the skeptic and an atheist communities more even though I’m taking something of a beating right now at the James Randi Foundation for a brief essay on why I relate to skepticism. To be fair, it’s not my best writing but it’s frustrating to see people dismissive of the notion that my life pretty much relies on skepticism. I remember going out on my early gigs as a newbie in the industry and just how much I really pulled from videos by popular skeptics on the scams pulled by snake oil salesmen and exploitative preachers. The videos showing a scam in action along with point-by-point narration on how a cold reading works have saved from ass from people who had intentions beyond my wallet and into my body.

It’s more emotionally accessible to tap into a mental database of strategies that a scammer, con artist, or exploiter can use to part you from your money than it is to dig into a mental database of red flags that you may be talking to someone who wants to hurt your body. When it comes to people using psychological manipulation to deceive you, the sooner you get the fuck out, the better. I look back on some of the situations that I exited early on because they resembled a scam and I’m grateful I took the time to learn how one effectively “cold reads” another person and decided that it was of no benefit for me to stick around only to find out that they went on to hurt and take advantage of others. I can look back and say that watching those debunking videos, even as pure entertainment, has saved my ass on more than a few occasions because they gave me the confidence to walk away early before the situation escalated.

In a broader political sense, my life depends on skepticism because right now the popular dialogues about sex work are full of outright lies and falsehoods. It’s going to take more than sex workers and sex positive people to make sure that the separation between church and state is maintained when it comes to legislation about adult sexual freedoms. I need skeptics, loud skeptics, to keep demonstrating the times when religious ideology and policy collide to help keep my unincarcerated liberty in tact. I’ve been a longtime fan of Bullshit because it addressed the hypocrisies and inaccuracies of sexual morality to an audience that isn’t necessarily keeping sex positive or sex worker activism and highlighted the fact that the prohibitions against sex work, porn, and sex education are not based in factual evidence and primarily fueled by dogma.

Photo by Shilo McCabe

The end result of this year has been reading Susie Bright for her amazing narration of political horror instead of the sex. Well, alright, in addition to the sex.  I picked up her books for the erotica but now I run back to them for some kind of insight into just what the fuck I’ve gotten myself into. The first time I read stories about the bomb threat against one of her lectures I felt detached shock. When the pornwikileaks harassment escalated when I spoke out against it I looked back over Susie Bright’s body of work with different eyes.

It is so much fucking safer to be like me now than it would have been to be like me even just a few decades ago. I had to go back to those Susie Bright books because I’m a sex organizer who talked about labor and got harassed and she was a labor organizer who had to deal with bomb threats for talking about sex. It seemed like a good time to go back and see what I could learn keeping my own email inbox in mind. I cannot use the stars of another to plot my own course but at this point in time I’m just trying to figure out where true north is and what I can generally and vaguely expect to find when I get there.

There are times when I open my inbox and I wonder aloud what I’ve gotten myself into by listening to my own voice on these issues. I’m on the other side of a cultural divide and I can never go back. The gap looks wider every time I look. At the same time the idea of not doing what feels right for me sounds awful. Then again, I’m hardly unique in my ambivalence. So many of my peers from my graduating college class are clutching diplomas that aren’t getting them the jobs they need to pay for the degree that isn’t even relevant to what they’re doing for a living.

I studied literature and I guess I took away the idea that you can write your own story. This is mine and as Dr. Gonzo famously said, “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”

I’m happy with what I’ve carved out for myself and the terms that I’ve kept. I enjoy my new home and yard space with fruit trees. I’m exceptionally happy in my relationship and I’m invigorated by the excitement of building something with him. Still even with this I feel fettered with nagging questions.

Do I want to be a better writer? Do I want to put in the amount of work I know that I really need to put into it? Or do I want to be a better activist and put my ideas for what could be into action? Do I want to work on being a better erotic performer and pornography producer? Do I want to throw myself into sex technology and continue developing the software and hardware in the PSIgasm at full throttle? Most of all, do I want to keep putting myself out there even though I know I’m going to get burned?

What kind of mayhem do I make this year?

There have been queer teachers around since the age of teaching first began. My Catholic schools were no exception.

It was the closeting that was the issue. In the 7th grade the parish deacon came to give my class the “sex and Jesus” talk. This is when we learned that to avoid masturbating we should read the bible and splash some cold water on our faces. I never thought that was good advice. There’s too much sexy stuff in the bible, really. I ignored most of everything by dragging my pen into my page to doodle and tearing the paper with each stroke. Then he started to talk about homosexuality. Aside from being a deacon (which is kind of like a de-caf priest in the hierarchy of the Church) he was also a therapist with a private practice.

My head jerked up to listen when he talked about working with homosexuals trying to fix themselves as if being queer were like alcoholism. He had 4 people he was “working with” to get rid of those inclinations and lead a godly life. “Sadly, two of them committed suicide and lost the battle,” he said. It was the first time I had ever heard of homosexual therapy in this way. I knew that it had to be bullshit because my parents both worked on a psychiatric ward and I used to thumb through the DSM when I was bored. I knew that homosexuality had been taken out of the big book but my deacon’s words were terrifying and silencing. I had no idea how to process what I was hearing so I just swallowed it and felt grateful that I hadn’t gone around asking questions or identifying myself as a queer. Not reaching out to the grownups for these kinds of issues was a survival instinct.

And yet I had queer teachers. They were always silent around these issues and that’s why I felt certain that I *could not* reach out to them either. I never knew for certain that they were queer because they never came out of made those kinds of announcements to junior high kids at a Catholic school. They always radiated a form of unhappiness. They relayed a message that being queer meant unhappiness and social isolation. It was my first recognition of bizarre politics beyond my understanding at play. When something is taboo, we make the assumption that no information should be provided about it and especially not to children. It’s not that I had advanced gaydar; most of the students could peg that something set something people aside from others. There was an adult world out in the mist and the best we could cultivate was a mythology around it.

I graduated on to high school and attended an all girls school. There were more queer teachers around this time with a little more prominence. Here it was at least a quiet fact without denial but there was certainly no promotion or prominence. There was no GSA and the one year I participated in the National Day Of Silence I was alone. I started to make my own noise about being queer and tested the waters. I harbored huge crushes after the seniors like many freshmen do. I still lacked a community to talk to and people to share those moments. I dressed in drag for my first formal and I posed for one of my graduation portraits in drag as well. I made up a queer community in my head and crossed my fingers that it would get better because I was invested in the notion that everything would get better when I took off to college and left conservative Catholic schools behind for good.

I had one teacher in high school who stood out to me. She taught English with a prowess for sarcasm and reason that I still admire across the years. Her classroom was a bullshit free zone. Meaningless demerits about uniform codes were nonexistent. There was no busy work, no surprise pop quizzes that eviscerated the soul of the literature we were reading. Everything went back into the text or the art of writing.

I cannot talk about this particular teacher in a wholly sentimental way because we didn’t have any hallmark moments. It was dry, short, and sweet even though I was the editor of the literary magazine my senior year and she was the faculty moderator. I distinctly valued the distance she had because it was done with respect and a lack of hysterics. There were no power battles between us and she was always reasonable with everything.

When given the unenviable task of getting teenagers to actually read Jane Eyre she would give us a chapter assignment like this: “Read up to chapter 7 tonight and feel free to get ahead but whatever you do, don’t read too far. There’s a lot of sex and I want to make sure we all read it together so I can help you understand it.”

I think a huge bulk of that class almost damn near finished the book on the first few nights. I remember laughing when I heard her give the assignment because I had read Jane Eyre already and got the objective. It was a fair game scam and she won my proper respect for it. She was also the first teacher to dock points from an essay for using the phrase “mankind” when I meant humanity. I still remember the sting of that A-. The only red ink on the paper was that line, a perfect essay save for a one word mistake. I focused on that edit trying to parse out what it meant that just one word could create such a strong deduction from the overall impression of my work. Every time I ever went to write “mankind” I saw the red ink and the A- and I opted for “humanity” instead.

I never even noticed that there were many other errors all over the essay. I always wrote things at the last minute and barely looked things over at all and for the most part I could get away with this pretty well and still get an AP rank. I could see through the Jane Eyre manuever but I fell hook, line, and sinker for what she was teaching me with that red ink. The typos, the few misspellings here and there, and some grammar issues can all be cleared up with editing. The ability to craft a sound essay that successfully communicated at least one decent idea was already there. But I had never questioned gender paradigms in writing and that was something much more profound.

That red ink actually changed the way I wrote. For a long time I just practiced the language but in doing so I started to consider other possibilities. One A- actually introduced gender theory to me in many ways and it happened in a place that was not very progressive at all. I know that it was an immense privilege to be her student for so many reasons. In college I sat through repeated lectures in upper division classes teaching the nuts and bolts of things I learned in her class. It was an eerie example of the degradation of schools that in the final year of my B.A. in tiny upper division seminars when my peers were hearing, for the first time, something that someone taught me when I was a junior in high school.

What I didn’t know at the time was the extent of her writing career. Just a few weeks ago I was wandering through the Mission District of San Francisco when I stumbled past a used bookstore and saw her name on the spine of a paperback. I bought it and read it over a course of a few days laughing and even sometimes blushing over some unexpectedly spicy tidbit from a lesbian sex scene. It made me regret not having actually given her more honest writing in my assignments or my work with the literary magazine. I held back in utter terror at what I was really pouring my heart and soul into. I handed in half-assed essays when there was draft after draft of something better and presumably too dangerous to hand into any school authority.

I never felt like I had permission to write freely. I took my first real chances in her classroom and hers were the first eyes to ever read any of my horrible adolescent queer fiction. She actually gave me exactly what I needed which was just an acceptance of its existence and some notes about how to work towards something stronger. I don’t know how many notes you can actually give to a young writer clearly terrified of actually engaging in the exercise. Her was an oasis but I didn’t want to take too many risks with the one place where sanity prevailed because its absence would have been very bad news for me.

This was the kind of school where in order to pass senior religion we had to plan a wedding. The religion teacher boasted about the popularity of the assignment and spoke of former students who came back to thank him for encouraging them to start planning their weddings early because of all the work involved. “This is like your thesis,” he said. “It’s very dyanmic. Go with it as far as you can. In fact, take your boyfriends engagement ring shopping. I promise that people will take you seriously and offer you coffee. You don’t have to tell them it’s an assignment.”

I was apalled by this. I already had an admittedly histrionic habit of refusing to do assignments that were busy work only and a waste of my time an energy. I was right but it was a dumb battle to fight. In order to graduate high school I had to make up a history class even though the University of California had already awarded me college credit for the exact same subjects as a result of my politics. I didn’t want to risk having to make up a religion class because there was no online university I could reach out to for a repeat. There was no getting out of this bullshit assignment though I negotiated firmly to do my project about wholly secular same-sex domestic partnerships.

In order to get my diploma, however, I had to plan my imaginary partnership around the style of a “normal” wedding. I got a C+ for forgetting to budget the cost of stamps for invitations. My biology grader had also taken a blow when I got another low grade on my “fake baby” assignment for failing to clothe the sack of flour I was instructed to cart around for a week. Somehow this class maintained its accreditation for science for the University of California as well. Having a fake baby for a week did not teach me a damn thing about mitochondria, I can say that much.

The reception of anything short of lady like behavior was met with hysterics and an old school mentality about noble womanhood. Girls who got knocked up were menaced by encouragement to go off to the “home for unwed mothers.” A known abortion would get you expelled as per the teaching of the Catholic church governing your education. This is totally allowed for private schools but I really would like to point out that there is no legal way for the school to have ever proven an abortion. Any time it happened must have come from confessions under scrutiny.

We even had random sniff searches by drug dogs. Once a month, our teachers and ourselves would be taken by surprise when the dean walked in with the drug dog company. We were to keep our hands away from our belongings and file outside the class while the dogs sniffed our bags and purses. While we were in class they sniffed our lockers and our cars in the parking lot. The dog would walk by our bodies as well. This procedure was set up when girls were found to be smuggling marijuana in tea bags to on a spiritual overnight class retreat.

I’ve always loved English class regardless of whether or not I liked the teacher because at least there were books to read. Having an English teacher who was a no drama dyke meant the world to me. Everyone else around me bought into the hysterics and the paranoia around our lives as teenage girls. The idea of holding that kind of post in a school like the one I attended would be a veritable hell on earth for me personally but I’m so deeply grateful that there was at least one class during the day where I was treated as a student and not a suspicious package left on a public transit platform.

I am frustrated that I can’t just name this person who was so important to me and a stepping stone for me to define personal happiness on my own terms. My dreams are regarded as bad dreams by my culture. To acknowledge someone by name as someone who helped that process would be more like implicating them in a downward spiral rather than an upward climb. For a teacher working at a small all girls Catholic school, that kind of publicity could put her job in trouble. Even if I wanted to, no one is ever going to let me teach a high school English class but I really couldn’t do it and feel happiness. I couldn’t smile through the bullshit bureaucracy and I would probably lose my shit and get uppity if I ever encountered another situation like the wedding project with any chance in hell to shut it down.

Still, I needed there to be at least one educator there to help me catch my breath and know that it would get better. There wasn’t a Dan Savage campaign for this at the time and I remember walking to school everyday past signs posted in yards to protect marriage when California formally stated that marriage was for a man and a woman. It was so strange to read Kafka and want to write an essay about how The Trial related to what it felt like to be a queer teen but I never did. There was a balancing act that my teacher maintained. Neither in the closet nor too publicly progressive she pushed the limits enough that I could look up and see the first example of someone who was queer who didn’t have a destroyed life over that fact. It was enough to be seen but not enough to be noticed.

I read her novels and I get a certain joy that she got away with writing what she did without a scandal. A quick read of her novels and the school handbook makes it clear that trouble was just a breath away. Hunter S. Thompson wrote an essay about “The Edge” that I have loved for many years. We frequently masculinize “the edge” but that very same edge is there when it comes to writing a novel very much based on the real world insanity of the all girls Catholic school where you work. That’s fire play already.  The indie queer XXX fisting SM porn star alum is just the kind of thing that could push it all over. It’s just the kind of fuel someone would use to enforce codes about what teachers can and cannot write about lest their students all run off to San Francisco to make porn rather than get married and raise 2.5 sacks of flour.

It troubles me so much that I have the real potential to fuck up her job by expressing public gratitude. One of the first things we teach children is to say please and thank you. That’s a ritual of my culture where I have to abstain or exercise caution. I can’t give you names, I can’t give you titles. I’m the awkward piece of a house of cards. Maybe it’s the end goal of my activism. I want to be able to thank the people who helped make me who I am and have them received in a positive light for their contributions and fingerprints.

We need queer teachers and we especially need them in anti-queer environments. When all you can see is the anxiety of queerness it’s easy to think that there is little to hope for in your own life. Not all students would benefit the way I did from this particular teacher. I didn’t want someone to cozy up and be a friend, I didn’t want a long listening ear after class. I just wanted someone else to acknowledge that it is hell and the best thing to do was get through it all and look for the light at the tunnel. My whole world was wrapped in constant anxiety that it could all go to hell at any moment. High school was like an emotional marathon. I didn’t need someone on the sidelines to be so friendly that I would be inclined to stay and chat for hours, I needed someone with cool water and a word of encouragement to keep moving.

A lot of amazing orgasm research took place in the 60s and 70s but then it seemed to drop of the map for a long time. I found this disappointing because technology had progressed so far beyond the tools used in earlier orgasm studies. It now longer took an entire room to store one computer. Tech went mobile but orgasm research started to get dusty.

Ned with version 1.0

I knew that it was possible to engineer something smaller, sleeker, and faster that could measure quantitative data about orgasms but I didn’t know how. I proposed the idea to my partner. Ned is a physics graduate student. He spends his days working on science and technology far beyond my knowledge could ever hope to be. He seemed a bit skeptical at first but I gradually won him over to tinker around with the idea and help forge an engineering plan.

We made our version 1.0 from a “Clone-A-Willy” kit ordered from the internet and a female condom. That was as far as my own vision could carry me. Nevertheless, it worked. Ned had actually put the pieces of my idea into something tangible that was actually recording the pounds per square inch exerted by the pelvic muscles. It wasn’t well calibrated at this point in time. That’s when Ned went about innovating.

Although I’m by no means the tech wizard that my partner is, the data was exhilarating to look at. The mobility of the device allowed for us to travel and find people in real world sexual environments rather than having them come to a cold and sterile lab. I could follow fluctuations in the body’s response and joked that we had created a sexual lie detector test. I remember watching it use on one subject while her partner whispered into her ear and bit her neck only to watch all of the sensors make a sudden spike in intensity. It was desire codified in quantitative data about her body.

The version 2.0 was more of a layover on the way to version 3.0. In the new edition, the sensors were more properly calibrated and capable of detecting even more data. A light sensor could read the vasocongestion (amount of blood accumulating in the genitals) as and there were sensors to detect radiative heat from the skin. We realized that we could also take more standard data through the device as well. Plans were made to record blood pressure and pulse. The completion of the 2.0 made it clear that we could do even more and propelled us to jump on our technical findings.

The PSIgasm is a computer inside a buttplug and moreover it is wireless. It’s nice to create the freedom for someone to move or thrash. Ned began using his 3D design software to create the 3.0 and the model is being formally produced. Our project was about something more than just building a new tool.

Whenever people told us to copyright everything we announced that we wanted it to be fully open source. We wanted to be 100% transparent with our work and that included showing people what it was we built and how we built it. We want to teach people both the science of orgasms and what one needs to do in order to build something similar. We want to reduce the gap of knowledge that people have about their own bodies. It’s a chance to see the orgasm as a process of the body rather than something scary or supernatural.

It’s been an amazing exercise in teamwork. The more projects my partner and I take on the stronger our relationship seems to get. Sometimes things become a whirlwind of madness around us and it’s hard to keep up with it all. There’s always something in the air waiting to be caught.

We’re also juggling the things between the two of us. We each have our own individual lives and projects afoot as well as the PSIgasm and a developing porn site. Sometimes it seems so surreal that this is happening. I don’t think I ever would have guessed that I would meet a man, go with him to volunteer in Haiti, fall in love, and start a porn site and build sex technology. I never considered it an option until I made it one.

I call myself a sex hacker and people ask me what that means all the time. The definition is ever changing and imperfect but I’ve always liked it. Part of it is about being one of the first generations in the world to develop sexually with the internet close at hand. So much of what I know and who am came about because of my access to information. It was a different internet then and there will be a different internet than the one we have in 5 years from now but I remember the wild west nature of it all. The internet has always been pretty populist but in the 90s it was predominantly nerds. The one internet accessible computer in my city’s library was the literal manifestation of freedom to me as a child.

I also study models of sexuality with great interest. I read everything in my path and ask intimate questions of strangers. In testing people for HIV I got to take a snapshot of the real world sexuality of the people around me and the way they challenged my assumptions. I could never anticipate what someone would tell me about their sex life. All I could do was listen. I still carry those stories with me. I have an insatiable hunger for more information about this strange happening of humanity and it is never dull.

Although my note taking I have made modifications on my own sexuality. I built my own relationship based on my needs and desires the way one might construct their own computer hard drive. I am picky about the software I run and when in doubt I’ll take the time to build something new. I can’t always bring my vision to life but I’m always on its trail. Why rely on what has come before when we are finally tasting the limitless? We all have the opportunity to build our dream machines and I advise people to consider the notion carefully. Think of the resolution and the file size of just one human memory here on Earth: how could you want to miss even one pixel of the grandeur of it all? I just don’t have faith in a one size fits all model for life, especially not one that was constructed somewhere far away by a mega corporation.

There’s always more to know and just the thought of that makes me wild with desire.

This PSIgasm project is about opening information about sexuality wild open. What happens when you bring ivory tower rigor into real bedrooms? What if you teach people how to build their own and start asking questions about what they see? I’m positively dying to know.

When I demonstrated the version 1.0 in front of a live crowd for the first time I could see something in the eyes of the audience I have felt so many times in myself. It’s all of those little things we feel but have difficulty articulating from time-to-time. I can’t imagine how amazing it must have been for the first researcher to look at a graph and see in the math what we traditionally describe as “toe-curling.” It’s exciting to see what brain scans are showing about our arousal processes and I promise that if we ever figure out how to build one of those in our garages that we’ll be the first to share.

Information about sexuality doesn’t belong to some people and not to others. It’s part of the human record and that science should be accessible to everyone. Doing live demos of the PSIgasm are by far the most exhilarating things I’ve ever done and I sometimes use liquid nitrogen in my sex life to spice things up a bit. The future of sex science looks so great I have to wear a splash guard.

Photo By Shilo McCabe

In March of this year, my partner Ned and I were doing our first formal shoot together as a couple for a project on rough sex and impact play. It was a delight to work on and as we laid back on a sweaty and come-covered bed we asked ourselves why we weren’t shooting our own content. We’re both switches so you never know whether one of us will be topping and bottoming. Suffice to say, we’re both enthusiastic perverts who love exploring our sexuality in the company of friends. We also have something to say about the way that people define their own relationships and the labels that just don’t match human experience.

March to August isn’t a lot of time and Ned may have set a new record for all of the hard work he put in behind the scenes. Although there may still be a few bugs here and there, we are pleased to announce the Meet The Mayhems is now operational! We’re loaded up with content that you can buy and download for $8 a month or buy the shoots you like the most individually. We’re always open to ideas and sexy suggestions so let us know what you would like to see!

As of now we’re running this entire project by ourselves without a crew. We’ve gotten some exciting press as we emerge from the gate from Fleshbot and Made of Words who both noticed the same thing: we are operating with no budget to speak of with big plans in our heads. The biggest thing that we want to show is that two people can be madly in love with one another as well as deeply in lust. We’re both pretty dirty and the site is hardcore, without a doubt. We want to show you how we fuck. Neither of us has a consistent bedroom role so who knows what kink we might explore next.

Photo by Shilo McCabe

In the future we’ll be sharing physics lectures across our bodies, videos of the PSIgasm in use and explained, dirty passages from classic literature, lots of outdoor shenanigans, liquid nitrogen play, scandalous behavior at science conventions, and a lot more. We’re not just nerds, we’re hardcore fucking nerds.

I should also mention that the $8 monthly membership won’t last long unless you subscribe now. We’re going to let all of our founding subscribers keep their monthly rate if they sign up between now and the Folsom Street Fair. We know that we’ve got some wrinkles to iron out and we really appreciate the amazing input we’ve been getting from the people who stop by. We really need and appreciate what you have to say about what you want to see and how your experience is working. We want our initial subscribers to keep their rate for all that they are contributing.

Yours in love and lots of butt sex,

Ned and Maggie Mayhem

Interesting narrative: It begins as a class fantasy because class porn is a staple of advertising. She has giant windows, she looks out. Is she a voyeur or an exhibitionist? Both? We watch her but she seems to know that. She recites John Stuart Mill’s “On Liberty.” This was an essay written about moral and economic freedom from the state. She drops ice into a glass on top of a sexy and well arranged cocktail cart with artfully displayed bottles of 901 Tequila. That’s all you’ll find in this house, nothing else will do. The pantry is probably full of 901 Tequila. She’s got a mind like a steel trap and a freezer full of perfectly cubed ice that never has chips or tiny pieces of frozen broccoli that somehow fell in, but fuck it, why bother to fish it out?

She is standing before a crowd of seated men while erotic closeups play on a slide machine. Retro technology is chic. You can hear the archaic but still recognizable sound of the slide carousel click in the background. That’s dedication to detail. Then we notice that the men are in fact bound, gagged, and obviously unnerved by the situation as the speech climaxes on the note of accountability. Smack, smack!- says the riding crop! 901 Tequila!

My only real complaint about this comercial is that it’s about tequila and not whiskey. Yeah, it’s skinny sexy lady softcore porn. Booze commercials are pretty much always about sex. Drink this, fuck that. There have been some bad gender politics in booze commercials so this advertisement is on the forefront of a new day in booze commercials in which women drunkenly kidnap men and make them watch their slide shows. I do think that her outfit is smoking hot and I wish I had one just like it even if I just wore it for blogging. I also empathize with the agave sipping heroine of this short erotic story sponsored by 901 Tequila.

I’ve seen suits like those on men who have stolen years of my life with their inane power point presentations. Those were afternoons when there were birds chirping and life happening just outside the office while I was forced to stare at a Dilbert cartoon they included “to lighten the business mood.” I will never get those hours back. The suits stole them.

So there’s that’s the fantasy for me: now you’re going to sit through my slideshow fellas and no tequila whiskey for you. I’m not even going to hit you with this riding crop, I’m going to use it as a pointer for my slide on Feminist Dada cave paintings. Why? Because I’m drunk. All we have here is perfect ice,whiskey, a slide projector, and this beautiful view of downtown. Here’s a slide of the view since you’re completely immobilized and can’t actually enjoy it right now. I should have another drink, I have to keep on drinking. They’re my sponsors. They pay for all of this and the artisan ice sculptors. Next slide. This is a pie chart of all the reasons I hate Cosmopolitan magazine.

This isn’t something I would want to act out in real life, of course.

Nerve pointed out that the ad plays with John Stuart Mill’s “On Liberty.” That makes it intellectual, drinking is a vice and the text of “Liberty” advocated moral and economic freedom from the state. There’s some interesting gender commentary going on with the tone and intent of the piece and it establishes the dry humor of the sensual confrontation.

A companion advertisement to this one has been terribly mislabeled, “Let Them Eat Cake.”

This sexy speech was actually written by Benjamin Franklin. Apparently it’s there’s a theme about the gendered language of independence writing. A sexy woman dresses in sexier clothes while reciting a deeply cynical excoriation of the British Empire and its taxes on its colonists in the prelude to the American Revolution. Then a man takes a sip of 901 Tequila. Then she takes off the necklace she just put on, the man removes her clothing, and it is implied that he is performing oral sex on her.

This is a commercial about those times when you’re drunk and horny but grasping onto that last shred of sobriety by trying to appear much less drunk than you actually are and what’s more you know it. You’re not slurring, you’re not stumbling, and for all intents and purposes you sound sober but the words leaving your mouth just don’t make one lick of sense. 901 Tequila: Smooth Drunk.

Both videos brought to you by Justin Timberlake.

“Contemporary fiction for teens is rife with explicit abuse, violence and depravity.”

In other news, kids today are still listening to music that is way too loud, wearing patently ridiculous clothing, stay out too late, won’t get off my lawn, and are a totally lost generation because they refuse to act the way my–or any other–generation has acted before them.

Mrs. Gurdon, as she is referred to at the bottom of the essay, could simply be mocked for her pearl clutching panic at the utter depravity of young adult fiction and her apparent discomfort with seeing the word FUCK in print. I laughed through most of her essay, hearing the echoes of anything that is and ever has been popular in any way among youth culture. Do the authors of these essays ever realize how cliche they sound when they recycle the words of the critics of rock music, the flower child movement, disco night clubs, mosh pits, heavy metal, south park, pornography, gangster rap, and virtually any phrase following the words, “Kids today…”

Oh, the horror the horror. Her closing line sucked all of the humor out of me. “ No family is obliged to acquiesce when publishers use the vehicle of fundamental free-expression principles to try to bulldoze coarseness or misery into their children’s lives.”

Let’s get something clear: the 1st Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America is not a fucking loophole.

It’s not a vehicle, it’s not part of the fine print of your credit card contract, it’s not a magic trick, it’s not a technicality. No one is “getting away” with saying bad things.  A) Get out of the tin foil hat aisle about there being a sinister plot by book publishers to extinguish adolescent happiness, forever. You’re confusing that with school. B) No one ever said that you were obliged to read, or to permit your children, to read any of these books.

Teenagers are allowed access to the entirety of the library. The young adult section is what gets them into the library. It is simultaneously a marketing device and a gateway. They can check out any book they damn well please. It’s a very flexible genre and as you point out it is a relatively new genre. It has a focus on modernity; even though young adult books as a whole feature young protagonists going to battle with the adult world and/or supernatural forces. I’m going to throw in the common character of the “psychotic serial killer of teenagers” as a supernatural force. It really originates when the pulp fiction market began to specialize and evolve. Teenagers aren’t the only people who flock to the young adult shelf. Many adults enjoy these books because the writing style is incredibly accessible and the plots are dramatic, romantic, and off the wall. The young adult genre is Law and Order: SVU on some serious and largely unstudied psychotropic chemicals harvested from the rain forests of South America.

A persistent trope in the YA genre is the fact that the adults do not have everything under control. They are stories about what it means to finally understand that the world around you is chaotic and dangerous without having any control at all over the structure of your own life. That’s what made them feel relateable, even in the face of blatant hyperbole. YA fiction is about the failure of our social systems; the way that people are falling into the cracks of schools, the way that the foster care system is a tangled mess of horrific abuse, the chain of events that can be set off in the brain of someone abused or violently bullied, the fact that being visibly queer or gender queer makes your risk of death by homicide go up.

Mrs. Gurdon makes it clear that it’s the pathologies that she doesn’t find agreeable to her senses. “Pathologies that went undescribed in print 40 years ago, that were still only sparingly outlined a generation ago, are now spelled out in stomach-clenching detail.” That’s quite true, especially as I glance up at my copy of Howl written by controversial writer Allen Ginsberg or 1962′s One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesesy. Mrs. Gurdon, surely you know as well as I why those voices were so silent 40 years ago. We locked those kinds of people up and tried to perfect the arts of altering the chemical makeup of the brain or the fine art of electro shock therapy.

Maybe it’s the snobbery that gets to me, the sense that better writers wouldn’t use crude language or words like FUCK to express their ideas. It’s a mindset that is more angry about the discomfort those kind of voices bring into the room than the circumstances that create them and allow them to thrive. It’s an obnoxious form of privilege to hold a personal aesthetic as the right thing for all humanity. Then again, I’m the activist type. When I read about these difficult things I start to getting a sense of personal responsibility about what I could do to reduce that kind of unnecessary human suffering. It’s a bad habit of mine.

At the very least, she could have taken time to pull her head out of the trees to take a look at the forest. This style of fiction has been pretty popular on the adult market as well. I’m aware that her focus is on children’s books, but the fuck-me-crazy addiction memoir genre has been booming. If you sift through the dates on these books, you’ll notice that they echo the dates of the novels that Mrs. Gurdon cites as examples. I would also like to point out that Oprah led the American people in a rallying cry for James Frey to be publicly displayed in stockades for not smoking enough crack.

I found it amusing that the list of young adult novels that can be recommended includes Farenheit 451 because the culprit of that novel was not the government, it was the people and their preference for the happy and quick medium of television entertainment. It is about a society that offended itself into art-lessness, turns against books and reading all while ignoring an impending war in the background. I can’t be the only thinks of this as a strange recommendation in context of the article surrounding it.

If you really want to talk about some depraved and offensive young adult fiction, think back to the “white girl with cancer” craze of the early 90s. These books romanticized death, suffering, and hospital stays like a medical fetish on steroids. This is my aesthetic speaking, of course, but I still get shivers down my spine thinking about those marketing meetings for books about 13 year old girls stoicly suffering through page after detailed page about the side effects of chemotherapy.

      In an act of great authorial sadism, the character of Dawn Rochelle (depicted above) is trotted out for 4 different books for her to relapse again and again from cancer, undergo bone marrow transplants, experience depression at losing her best friend at the hands of the same exact disease that she is faced with, the social stigma of being known as “cancer girl” at school and furthermore, if the girl in that cover picture of this book is 13 years old then I am the Queen of Siam. These books are theoretically optimistic because little Dawn has her faith, her teddy bears, and her optimism for recovery and learning as much as she can with this difficult process. Let’s make no mistake about it, these books were trauma porn. Other popular titles include, Let Him Live; Please Don’t Die; She Died Too Young; Someone Dies, Someone Lives; Baby Alica is Dying; and let’s not forget the grandest trauma porn collection of them all: Chicken Soup For The Soul.

    Frankly it was about time for that tide to turn on the notion that you should always be stoic through your suffering and that misery is a part of God’s plan. The human imagination is frequently dark and twisted and that includes children. They role play death with a smile. They play the roles of heroes and villains. They adore playing with toy weapons. Ban guns all you like, but the moment they are exposed to the image of gunfire they’ll invariably start to pick up sticks or hangers or anything else to stand in as the prop. They are trying to untangle the great human mysteries of good and evil, life and death. As adults we’re so jaded to senseless violence and suffering that we forget to ask questions about why it prevails. They ask uncomfortable questions like, “if we have so much food and we can’t even eat it all, why are we allowing people to starve to death in other places of the world?”

     Most of the YA fiction I read was total trash and I knew it. It was titillating, it held my attention. When my peers were reading Goosbumps, I was consuming Christopher Pike novels like they were crack cocaine in print. For those unacquainted with this author, his novels frequently opened like a teenage whodunnit but then the plot twist at the end would be that the killer had utilized a satanic ritual from ancient Egyptian psuedo-metaphysics to switch everyone’s bodies and souls. I read Caroline Cooney’s twisted novel The Fire (out of print now) many times through and through. It was about school adminstrators running a boarding school for youngsters coming in from an island off Maine and then deliberately driving them insane through abuse. Rather than feeling jaded that the authors of these books were just making shit up as they went along, I felt liberated.

    I could put my pen to paper and make up the rules. I could make up an entire universe. I could make anything happen. I could make it all up as I went along.

     Like most teens, there was some darkness happening in my life. What I learned from reading all of those books is that I could do something creative with that pain. I could let my imagination run wild, I could make the demons as big as I needed them to be, and if the laws of physics made any of this seem impossible…well, then I could rewrite those laws to suit the needs of my plot. I’m not proud of anything I wrote and I’m still working on what it means to be a writer but I can say that I’ve always put in the practice. I’m not a great writer, but I am a better writer.

     YA fiction got me to read and the more I did it, the better I got. In many ways that process was aided by the repetitive nature of commercially popular titles. I wasn’t just reading 20 different books, I was reading 20 books by the same author. Eventually the patterns and the outlines popped out of me. Rather than seeing the stories themselves, I was honing in on the process. I would compare that with another 20 books by another author of the same genre and I could pull out the elements of style. They taught me more about how to write than any university class I have attended sheerly at the repetition and ease of consumption. They encouraged me to indulge and to reach to the edges of my creativity.

    Learning to run to my notebook in a crisis has been invaluable to me. YA fiction helped me spill it all out and explore it. It helped me understand myself better. It pushed me to articulate and analyze.  It taught me that no human emotion is irrelevant. It helped me sharpen my perspective on my culture when I realized that there were consistent generalizations about sex and gender that existed across entire popular genres. Why is it that all of the 6,000 year old Egyptian bisexual vampire chicks were always depicted as blonde haired and blued on the cover? Had I missed something in the vampire mythology about that? Why were all of the gay male characters always depicted as dying of AIDS? What blend of hash was it exactly that made all of those teenagers go bonkers or astrally project? I went to UC Santa Cruz and not once did I ever astrally project.

     These questions remain unanswered and yet here I am, for better or for worse, writing about them.

As an atheist, “mecca” has always been a metaphor for me. I do not believe there is a creator who graces just one place among all else that it has allegedly designed with a supreme intellect. Mecca has never been an answer to human prayers, it is a place for humans to pray. Makkah is the indisputable holy city of Islam. 13 million Muslims come to the city limits and several million will arrive specifically for the few days of the Hajj. People come with all sorts of motivations behind their pilgrimages not all of which are religious devotion. This past weekend, in spite of the rain, the world’s largest BDSM showcase was held once again in San Francisco. Kinky pilgrims from all over the world came out to buy things, meet their favorite fetish stars, see friends, find lovers, gawk, to fantasize, and most of all to hope.

The fact that Pride and the Folsom Street Fair exists is important. The fact that so many people come out despite the horrors of the “leather menace” which was depicted infinitely worse by the media than it is today (and let’s be honest, when you see someone kinky on TV they’re still usually linked to murder and violence) because it used to be damn near impossible for kinky people to gather together publicly. There are still raids on leather bars and the alcoholic beverage commission keeps a sharp eye on leather bars looking for any reason to pull a license.

In 1976, the LAPD used a 19th century anti-slavery statute as justification for raiding a gay bathhouse hosting a “slave auction.” The activity was consensual and the proceeds from the auction were going to gay charities. Nevertheless, the newspaper headlines read, “LAPD SAVES GAY SLAVES.”  $100,000 of tax payer money went to pay for 65 officers, 2 helicopters, about a dozen cars, 2 known wiretaps, and surveillance of a gay magazine and its staff. There were 40 people in attendance at the party. After being arrested, party goers were left for hours without bathroom access, kept in handcuffs, and subjected to full strip searches. Today, the “slave auction” for charity has gone mainstream and the methods of negotiation designed and developed in dungeons is applied to ensure the spirit of fun and consensual nature of the activity.

We are still schluffing off the layers of stigma and internalized shame. We are still learning what justice means. My communities are made freak flag flyers and pleasure seekers. We may not agree on what this means and sometimes I even wonder if there’s any space for me but then I remember all of the people I met and all the things of done none of which would have been remotely possible without my community. I happen to be quite fond of the fact that I’ve been locked up behind bars or in an asylum on a permanent psychiatric hold just for liking kinky sex.

We can neither ignore the many problems in our midst nor can promote letting it all burn to the ground. I cannot take for granted the ground gained. I haven’t written about this before but in 2009 when I was in Tanzania, Africa working at a district hospital and a local NGO I had a needlestick accident. I’m not a good enough writer to tell you what it was like to feel the sharp prick in my palm at the base of my thumb, to see the blood filling my glove, and to slowly pull the needle out of my palm where it went in one side and came out on another.

So I started PEP which is post exposure prophylaxis. Twice a day I took a dose of AZT as a way to prevent an HIV infection after exposure. 28 days, 56 pills, and probably a good 15-20 lbs shed over the course of a few months. Although I grew up as a misfit kid who started being deliberately not invited to parties starting in the 3rd grade, I had no idea what lonliness felt like until the other American volunteers who had been friendly and outgoing with me until the news of the accident broke.

“Oh my God, Maggie, if I were you my parents would be airlifting me out of here right now. I can’t even imagine…I would just be, like, paralyzed on the bed with panic. Really, it’s probably best that it happened to you because no one speaks English here and you’re so smart about AIDS. I would hug you, but you know, the AIDS thing…”

People didn’t stopped all forms of physical contact. No handshakes, no hugs, and certainly none of me coming anywhere near their food. It happened all at once and worst of all people were trying to be “nice” about it.

For many years my work office was in a shelter for HIV+ youth 18-24 years old. Seasoned social workers used to tell me I was “brave” for working there because wasn’t I afraid that someone would spit on me and give me AIDS? Very calmly I would explain the 411 on HIV infection and then I would complain to my immediate HIV prevention team and we would all share that awkward laugh when something is fucked up beyond recognition. Confronting this misinformation was our job.

I felt like utter shit to be on the receiving end because even as I worried, I knew it was statistically unlikely that I would seroconvert from this single exposure. Still, I worried. I could also feel the distinct sting of falling right onto my privileged ass. Some people go through that kind of ostracization every single motherfucking day of their lives. Part of my work in Tanzania was to dig a latrine for an HIV+ woman exactly my age. She had likely contracted the virus from her husband who told people that she was possessed by demons. Her parents would not let her into the house for any reason. She was sleeping in the chicken coop. At the very least, the goal was to build a hygienic place for her to use the bathroom.

A lot of people laugh at the part about the demons without understanding that maybe there is no other word for the effects of hateful bias. Even in the states, the stigma against people with HIV is real. I knew it was real and I called it out when I saw it. Being on the butt end of it, even for just 28 days, made me realize all the times I didn’t see it at all. Moreover, I had no idea how to contend with my privilege as an American. Those of us who put our clothes in a closet, sleep in a bed, have indoor plumbing, and live with a roof over our heads are richer than 75% of the world. It’s all well and good for me to learn life lessons in Tanzania over two months of work but really they are nothing more than a tourist’s musings. I had the privilege to hop on a plane and go to another country to not be paid for any work I did and then to hop on a plane and go home. I hurt because I was lonely and I hurt because the extent of that pain told me just how much I totally took for granted. I hated myself and I hated my home country for 28 days in Tanzania.

I remember emailing a small group of my kinky friends. At several dollars a minute, phone calls were way out of my budget. I reached out as best I could: I explained the situation and I was honest about my fear. I asked them to write back with memories of home so that I could feel less scared by myself. It was one of the hardest emails I’ve ever written in my life because I was convinced it wasn’t acceptable for me to do anything of this and be afraid. I felt like I was letting people down by having the accident at all. What kind of a fucking professional was I? I had been handling HIV+ blood in vials for years without any incident or exposure. I was ashamed of myself. It was a difficult email to send.

One response came back quickly and understood the intention of my note completely. It came from a friend who identifies as a 24/7 slave and is going to be a mom very soon now. She sent kind words about what people were up to and sent many pictures both kinky and vanilla. I read it so many times because it was like the spritz of juice from peeling open an orange with your bare hands. Most of the messages back were fumbled making it clear that the person on the other end felt just as afraid if not more than I did about the whole situation. Although I was comfortable talking about these issues, I’ve also had years of training. HIV is a chronic illness from my perspective but for the kinky and sex positive communities it can still be a boogeyman.

Part of my homecoming was finding out that some kind of horrible version of game of telephone had transpired. There was a rumor in the community that I had gotten AIDS in Africa, that my extreme weight loss was from “white guilt anorexia,” and different versions of “what did Maggie expect? I mean, she did go to Africa. Duh.” Most of it was just dumb, some of it was infused with racism, a lot of it was just confusion. Some people, even with years of monthly state of the art testing confirming my negative status still worry that they might still somehow contract HIV from my exposure. Ignorance was the thread holding it all together and while ability to calmly respond to misinformation about the virus was gone. I didn’t have it in me to explain it all again to someone who just let something spiteful fall out of their mouths without thinking.

I felt distant to my community but closer to people who reached out to just let me hurt for awhile with them. Sometimes it was even sexual. One of my friends that I met at a BDSM conference made it a point to take me to a restaurant that served souffle and only souffle. He made it a point to say that it was his treat for the sacrifices I made over the months. He wined and dined me and I was thrilled to consume so freely. Then, back at my place, we scened throughout the night seamless switching between dominant and submissive roles.

He would pin me to the bed, slap my face and my chest, yank my hair, and make me get vocal.  Then after awhile I would flip him over and use my fists on his muscles and reach my fingers into his ass until I was reduced to sobbing. He dug his fingers in his cunt like he was looking for me in there. I couldn’t come. I couldn’t come. I wound up sobbing some more.

I was coming back, though. There was no need to have an orgasm that go around because that wasn’t why we were fucking. It was love in a strong beautiful sense of the word. He was there as a friend when I needed it the most. We met at a leather conference.

And even though my letters had some unintended consequences, I got one that understood. We met at a kinky venue as well. The best thing about community is its potential to reduce loneliness in the world. Loneliness isn’t being alone because I often like to be alone. Loneliness is a dank sense of isolation and the keyhole into human despair. I got reconnected with my communities because I want to leave a legacy of less loneliness in the world. I don’t want to become so jaded I tell myself that something is hopeless because I think we tell ourselves that to lift the burden of responsibility to create change off of our shoulders. It is a lie that there is nothing to be done.

Right before I went to Haiti, I was promised by a porn company I worked for that they would host a fundraiser. I had meetings, I spoke about live on camera with the people in charge, and it was smiles all around until the ball got dropped and the promise was forgotten entirely. “Here we go again,” I thought. The cynicism was starting to overwhelm me. I only had a few weeks before my departure date and I was prepared to clench my bitter jaw and figure it out on my own.

Then something strange happened. One of the people who worked for that same company made the decision that the fundraiser had to go on whether or not it was being officially sponsored by his employer. He went to work, he got a venue, a DJ, and started getting in touch with other people who could help. Kinksters, queers, pervs, and porn whores all came out to a fundraiser to get me and my partner down to Haiti.

My community came through for me because this time there were people who knew what to do. I was amazed by the support I received and I came to a better understanding that we humans are pretty paralyzed by things we don’t understand and also scare us. That fear prevents us from getting up close to something and figuring out just what it is that is scaring us so badly. This quality we have of stepping back from those moments is one of the reasons we survived long enough on earth to build up a civilization and the remnants of which turn into our horrible -isms. This is why we prepare for emergencies, this is why we train for our jobs, this is why we have to keep on learning throughout the entirety of our lives.

Communities are made of humans all trying to figure this mess out. It takes a lot of work and it’s all too easy for us to be derailed by our own egos and to believe we have some sort of right to revenge. Nothing gets better with more hate piled on top of it. It only makes for a longer night.

This is why we must light a candle when it is dark and let that light shine. One candle alone won’t do the job but it lets the others in the darkness come near so that we aren’t all alone in the shadows. I want to keep shining as brightly as I can and I want to be a lighthouse when I grow up, a giant candle on the stormy waters. I want people to find their way to safe harbor even if it is just for a short rest on their way to other adventures. I guess this is because I am also a sailor who has been lost at sea during nights without any stars to guide me and it was the people on the shoreline, my community, who maintained a flickering light in the distance and helped me find my way home.