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Archive for the ‘politics’ Category

FYI to everybody posting this video: I am not watching “Two Lesbians Raised a Baby and This is What They Got” no matter how much you pay me. Sorry – it sounds like a last-century circus act or super old-fashioned heart-warming Jimmy Stewart movie, if Jimmy Stewart would ever have played such a “progressive” role. Which he wouldn’t have.

Just tell me what it is that I’m missing out on if I’m not being fair, because when I attempted to watch 7 seconds of it I almost vomited. EMBARRASSING. Look! He has white skin! He can afford a suit! He’s able to tie a tie! He’s so articulate and poised!!

What happens then? Does he pull a kitten out of his ass and bring it back to life with his amazing lesbian-learned Reiki powers? No wait, the point is that HE IS CLEARLY SO STRAIGHT AND COULD PASS FOR A REPUBLICAN!

NOBODY WHO HATES QUEERS IS GOING TO BE TRANSFORMED BY WATCHING THIS. I mean, if you know someone who hates us who’s had a change of heart because of this video, please let me know. I’d love to hear that story. Otherwise consider me repelled.

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Seriously: am I being totally unfair and should force myself to suffer through more of it to give Zach a fair shake? I just think that if Zach were a transman or Asian or a woman (instead of a white dude with an alpha presence and a douchebaggy know-it-all voice) everyone wouldn’t be watching this thing or listening to them at all. The whole premise of it makes me rancid with disgust.

Wait a second . . . maybe he IS a transman! Color me full of assumptions!! Please tell me he’s trans and I might then watch it.

Dear BarackObama.com: I’m physically revolted by your “meet the president backstage!“, Michelle wants you to “sign Barack’s birthday card“, etc. spam.

GROSS.

Seriously, he’s the PRESIDENT.

I voted for him, that doesn’t mean I’m a panty-throwing groupie or histrionic fangirl gluing glitter to homemade sparkly-heart cards I send to him weekly with my diary entries attached.

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I think I should raise my pay-to-play rate on cam. I’m one of a small handful of English-speaking American blondes with hairy cunts on that site and stay busy at the standard $3.99 / 4.99 a minute rates. My bush is a TREASURE. What say ye, camgirls and fans?

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Note: I know, I still need to edit and post that Obama dildo video for members from way-back-when in which I type out a letter to him before sticking his likeness inside my great wet hope. Here are some free picture samples from the gallery:

Blue State Trixie & her Obama Dildo

I think hemorrhoids are totally patriotic, don’t you? Like, fuckin ALL AMERICAN!!

Anyway, what I’m TRYING to say is that maybe I *am* a fangirl . . . just stop embarrassing me with those weird emails inviting me to go on tour with him (FOR A PRICE) or whatever! It’s such a fucked-up pimp-like thing to do to the man. But thank you for reminding me that even the most powerful (according to the myths) man in the world is the subject of degrading and misleading marketing campaigns even worse than the ones webwhores are featured in.

Speaking of that, why is my current fave camsite promoting a big porn paysite on their front page? The worst part is the big porn paysite they’re promoting is known far and wide within the internet porn world as being unethical and fucked up – one that good webmasters refuse to promote because they own(ed?) a bunch of tube sites filled with stolen/pirated content. Oh well. Just one of those little compromises we deal with (trust me, THIS particular one is TINY compared to other shit that goes down in the camworld). At least I don’t have my wife writing to everyone in the fucking country telling people to sing me happy birthday or whatever. I *hate* that song!

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P. S. I really am blonde and hairy — the Obama gallery is from many moons ago.

Today we went to a protest against civil rights abuses and I realized THAT’S THE FIRST ORGANIZED PROTEST I’VE EVER ATTENDED! Which seems nuts, that as a thirty-six year old woman who is opposed to SO many things and has lived near Seattle my whole life, I have never been out in the streets with my floppy tits wrapped loosely in a shredded flag, armpit hair fluttering in the breeze as I pump my fist shouting a determined message even as I’m hoisted over the bulky shoulder of an armed man in riot gear.

Sorry to disappoint, but today was nothing like that.

Still, it was important and I’m glad we went. I’d love to be more specific and share the details with most everyone but as my webwhoring years have added up I’ve realized that sometimes I need to withhold some information for the sake of privacy and safety. What I will say, though, is it isn’t connected to porn or sex work which in a way is sad because I’d like to be a better activist when it comes to civil rights issues related to the sex industry. This, though, is more local and I feel like I can more safely make a difference by being involved in it which is not something I can do locally (meeting up with people face-to-face) as a webwhore.

Delia actually sat this one out in the car because she has a soul-patch-like burn on her chin from her first overzealous laser hair removal treatment (she’s been going through the process for years now and this is the first time she’s gotten burned like that) and she didn’t want to be out in the sun. This left me open to being approached by a cute ewok-looking fellow with a jaunty chipped front tooth who appeared to be about seven to ten years my junior. I almost told him I have a girlfriend, but then decided if he really was “interested” maybe it would lure him into getting involved. See, deep freckled cleavage can really win support for a cause. And I like bearded little roly poly guys.

I was actually a little concerned about the location of this protest because it’s right next to an ultra-conservative hangout but they didn’t come streaming out to scare us away or even mount a counter-protest. Instead I only saw about three people give us the thumbs-down and everybody else who responded as they drove by seemed happy to see us and honked, waved, hollered, etc. in support. That’s a good feeling, but scary knowing this shit is going on even with so much outspoken criticism.

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The past few days have been pretty windy here (I could barely hang onto my sign today) so it wasn’t a big surprise when we lost power for a few seconds tonight. Could throw a monkey wrench into our spycam transmissions and Delia’s update which she’s trying to get uploaded and posted tonight, though. After the protest we had to drive all the way back to suburban hell to have them remove the inky security tag on a pair of jeans Delia bought on Thursday that they forgot to remove. Sometimes living so far from a real city is inconvenient. And sometimes it’s just kind of scary (see above: there is some bullshit that wouldn’t be tolerated in Seattle but in rural and small-town areas it’s commonplace). But of course so is living near or IN a city, just for different reasons.

I wish I had more time and brain power to consume other people’s blogs because when I do, I come across provocative and revealing entries like these two about class:

Keeping San Francisco Safe From Prostitutes?
Melissa wrote this back when SF voters had the chance to decriminalize prostitution. They didn’t, of course, and her post explains a lot of reasons why even a supposedly-progressive, liberal, educated population is ignorant and afraid of sex workers running amok:

“The biggest opposition to Prop K isn’t anti-prostitution feminist groups. It’s ‘neighborhood associations.’ Unlike even the most socially conservative feminists, they never say, I don’t want sex workers to be raped. They say, I don’t want to see sex workers. Don’t want to see them on their front steps. Don’t want to see their clients or ‘pimps’. Don’t want to see condoms, or syringes. In short: don’t want to see poverty, don’t want to see poor people. . . . What K opponents will never say in public, is that it’s not prostitutes that are hard to live next to — it’s poverty.“

On a more personal note, Amber Rhea posted an extremely intimate entry yesterday sharing her memories of class-consciousness developing in childhood and young adulthood and reflections on all of that jazz (like how attending private school probably saved her life).

“My mom was a bartender until I was 7 or 8 years old. When I’d go spend the night at friends’ houses, I’d take my toiletries in a purple Crown Royal bag (we always had tons of them around the house). We also had a lot of extra beer/liquor T-shirts that I used as nightshirts . . . . it wasn’t until I was in my teens that it dawned on me why [my friends'] parents might think it’s weird for a 7-year-old to carry a Crown Royal bag and sleep in a Finlandia T-shirt.”

Without going into a lot of detail (just because I don’t have time to write that book right now), I can’t overemphasize how much my socioeconomic background shaped my identity and values. More than being female. More than being white. Even though both of those things are a big huge intrinsic part of it, the money stuff and place my family occupied (pretty low down) in the hierarchy colors the way I see and respond to pretty much everything, I think, and in such insidious ways that I’m constantly chipping away at my lack of awareness at how deep it goes and how far back and how much it continues to effect my options and choices today.

Sometimes I feel like discussions about race and gender are just big polarizing distractions to keep us from addressing the BIGGER, all-encompassing issue of class. They’re not, but sometimes I feel that way (and I know some other people do, too).

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A related note: right now I resent the way blame is laid for the recession. Instead of saying that banks ass-raped tons of people who probably COULD have made their mortgage payments if not for the usury/deception/inflated interest rates and doubled/trebled payments, every comment seems designed to tell us that banks simply LENT MONEY TO POOR PEOPLE. Like, THAT was the big mistake. As though those borrowers could never have made FAIR payments on mortgages with FAIR terms. As though people wouldn’t have felt the need to take out second and third mortgages to be able to pay credit cards with ludicrous, unjustifiably-high, ass-raping interest rates.

The mainstream discussion about it and language referring to sub-prime mortgages, etc. is all backwards; it *pretends* to call the lending institutions and big mucky-mucks greedy while using language that continues to make it sound like the banks’ problems were making bad bets on bad people, when really they fucked vulnerable people dry, butt-ramming them straight into the ground. Let’s just bleed these people dry. When you make financially troubled people pay exorbitantly high interest rates and double their minimum payments, etc. what the fuck do you THINK will happen? Unless they win the lottery, they’ll never be able to keep up or dig themselves out of the deep grave the lenders dug for them.

I’m not making these comments as someone who thinks she has all the answers or understands the complexity of all of it or is well-read on the subject. I’m making them as an average joe butt plumber based on her own experiences with banks and mainstream exposure to superficial news with a little bit of deeper reading here and there. My intention isn’t to spark a big-ass discussion about it, just web-log some stuff. The above paragraphs are only a small chunk of reflection, not a complete or coherent argument. I won’t publish comments from people assuming I’m claiming to be an expert or assuming that because I haven’t written this or that or included another bit or piece, that I must not agree with this or that bit or piece, nor will I publish comments demonstrating a lack of comprehension regarding what I already wrote. HATE that.

For the record, my interest isn’t really in “punishing” rich people (even when they DO *deserve* to be hung from the highest tree) or placing limits on how much money people can make, it’s on making fair regulations and restrictions on how deeply people can be abused. It’s on little things that would change a lot. LIKE NOT LETTING CREDIT CARD COMPANIES MAKE YOUR PAYMENT DUE ON A WEEKEND OR HOLIDAY, THEN CHARGING YOU A LATE FEE AND RAISING YOUR INTEREST RATE BECAUSE YOU FAILED TO PAY ON TIME WHEN YOUR PAYMENT ARRIVES ON THE NEXT BUSINESS DAY FOLLOWING THE DAY THEY DEMANDED YOUR PAYMENT, BUT CAN’T EVEN RECEIVE IT/WON’T EVEN PROCESS IT. It’s a pretty fucking simple matter — we have the technology at this point to automatically reject a date that is a holiday or weekend and chose either an earlier or a later date, or to have a FAIR regulation that doesn’t even ALLOW lending institutions to punish you for not delivering a payment on a day when delivery of said payment IS IMPOSSIBLE.

Seriously. I don’t understand why everyone isn’t talking about things like this. Everyone. All day. Until something happens.

Just one example. I know *some* people are talking about it some of the time, but it’s not on headline news, etc. every five seconds the way Chris Brown is. Instead everyone just ignores and skirts around these tangible, obvious bits of fuckery. It just keeps adding up, but I don’t hear anything except “bail out”. If anyone has links to proposed regulations tightening this shit up, I’d love to read it because as it is right now I’m too busy bitching about it to look the shit up (I know! I’m an ass!). I know awhile back congress was talking about putting an end to the credit card companies burying high interest rate balances under the lower interest rate balances, but I don’t know whatever became of that/if they are in fact now forced to automatically apply payments to the balances with the highest interest rates first.

Why am I still sitting here blogging about this? Seriously, all I was going to do was post two links. Gaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhh . . . hate myself for not keeping up with the news on this stuff better.

We woke up early to watch the Inauguration yesterday; I turned the television on as fast as I could and pretty much started crying immediately. I’m a sucker in general for ritualized ceremonies, but a lot of things made it extremely emotional for me. There’s all the obvious stuff of watching a momentous, proud, hopeful, inspiring piece of history, but other stuff, too. Like remembering watching Reagan’s Inauguration with my grandpa when I was a little girl. Like seeing two little girls who love their dad and thinking of my own dad and my sister and I when we were their ages. Seeing the former presidents and vice presidents and first ladies from my lifetime walking (or hobbling) in or not being there at all (like my dad and my grandpa) was like looking at a timeline with my own lifespan clearly marked on it. It’s not a long line, even if I’m lucky and only a third of the way through it. I didn’t think of it this way on a conscious level until hours later and realize that part of what I cried about was my own mortality.

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Then I had a doctor appointment. That made me feel even more like a rusting machine getting ready to be dismissed from operation. It wasn’t a good experience and by the end of last night with money stress, the emotions of the morning, sleep deprivation and all of the symptoms I went to the doctor for in the first place, I was really ready for a good night’s sleep and too wound up to jump right into it.

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Check out my Inauguration Day tweets if you want some more of my reactions to yesterday. Apparently I’m the only person who loved the poem. Other people thought it was robotic — not a word I’d have chosen to describe it, but even if it was I totally love robots so maybe that’s why I liked it. At first I thought her delivery was too contrived, but a few lines into it I just heard the words/saw the moments she captured and thought it was fucking brilliant and spot-on. I burst into tears when she said the last nine words of this chunk:

Say it plain, that many have died for this day. Sing the names of the dead who brought us here, who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges, picked the cotton and the lettuce, built brick by brick the glittering edifices they would then keep clean and work inside of.

I complained yesterday about not hearing anyone comment on the poem (and felt totally annoyed seeing people walking away from the ceremony before she even started; these must be the same assholes who go to watch fireworks displays but leave before the finale because they want to “beat the traffic” but maybe I’m being unkind and they all just have small bladders and/or diarrhea) but now I’m glad I didn’t hear any chatter about it on CNN or online (I know it’s out there, I just haven’t looked for it or read it). I don’t know anything about poetry, but I do know I love Walt Whitman and I do know he loved Lincoln and I do recognize nods to Whitman in yesterday’s poem and that all of that fits into the deliciously morbid Lincoln-channeling going on with Obama being the first to use the Lincoln bible and doing all of those other following-in-Lincoln’s-footsteps black-cat-crossing things.

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We spent most of today shopping since we had to make the journey to suburbia for Delia’s laser hair removal appointment. It was so much fun hearing people, especially kids, talking about Obama (kid pointing at books & magazines: “look, Mom! It’s Barack Obama!”). I hate that I can’t shake the feeling of impending doom, though. I know other people have to be feeling it, too. Still, everything’s shimmery and sparkly right now . . . very storybook-like (even with the oath do-over). Watching the ceremony yesterday I did halfway feel like I was watching a pre-pre-pre-prequel to Star Trek Next Gen. Like everything good could really come true someday and all of the buildings and monuments were bad backdrop paintings of futuristic architecture.

I don’t regularly fantasize about the White House as a super-glamorous place and never have felt like the people living there were royalty the way people felt about the Kennedy years. It’s kind of exciting to experience that now; I can’t help it, thinking about those girls moving in there and having slumber parties. I’m totally sucked into it. The allure of a lot of chick things (weddings) escapes me but stories involving orphans, boarding school, or preteen girls spending the night in museums or moving into the White House are always going to capture my imagination. It’s almost as good as eating buckets of mashed potatoes and gravy, imagining Sasha and Malia safe and happy, the most famous little girls in the world ensconced in THE WHITE HOUSE with closets full of pink clothes and barbies and books and halls to run in and a prissy nanny who tells them stories and feeds them cucumber sandwiches.

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I’ve got some Obama-themed pictures to post from my latest members-only gallery but haven’t had a chance to make promos so it’ll have to wait. In the meantime you can check out Delia’s samples if you’re not a member.

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Another sad thought I had yesterday was for our friend whose mom just died. I imagined him and AmberLily dealing with their loss and this Inauguration going on at the same time. How weird it would be to feel like everyone in the world is paying attention to this ceremony while they’re distanced from it by having a huge personal transition and ceremonies of their own to attend to. When big events coincide with personal crises it can be so isolating and bizarre. I haven’t wanted to call them, but I’m definitely thinking of them and hoping for the best for them.

Before I post a bunch of frivolous softcore-in-the-Seattle-snow pics today, I want to at least mention that today’s an important one: The International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers.

When the economy is in the shitter (the direction it’s headed right now) people are MORE judgmental and resentful about how much other people are paid and for what kind of work; that’s a recipe for even more violence against sex workers. Lots of perpetrators of violence against sex workers explain that their crimes are justified because they shouldn’t have to pay for sex — the woman (or sometimes man) and the work s/he’s charging him for are not worthy of payment and/or should be punished for thinking she is. Check out this guy who said a prostitute put her head in his plastic bag by mistake when he wanted his $100 back. For trying to kill her he’ll only get a few months in the slammer.

It’s not going too far to say that beating, raping, exploiting, infecting, killing, stealing from sex workers and/or refusing to abide by their boundaries is covertly state-sanctioned — the government says sex workers don’t have the right to charge money for their services in most places. Not only do they not have the right to charge money, they are CRIMINALS if they do so. In some places in the United States you can be arrested simply for carrying too many condoms — it’s intent to sell access to your body (which you have no right to do, and if you intend to flout the law in this way you deserve to expose yourself to disease and pregnancy)! You can be charged with a crime in many places just for advising other sex workers ABOUT sex work. The government might not have a bounty on sex workers and we all might SAY that killing them is going too far, but it’s a pretty fucking mixed message.

While most of my own work as a webwhore is legal (I say “most” because some of it could easily fall under the nebulous definition of “obscenity” – that and a couple of other things I can think of could land me in prison if the Department of Justice or other unsavory elements chose to target me) and I feel fairly safe doing this work (not just safe for a whore, but even safer relative to women with straight jobs), there are still more than enough people who resent me and women like me for making our livings this way. People who spew hatred and threaten violence that all falls under the category of, “BITCH! YOU DO NOT DESERVE MONEY FOR WHAT YOU DO & YOU DESERVE TO BE PUNISHED FOR EVEN SUGGESTING ANYONE PAY YOU FOR THIS!! I will *take* by force what you deny me for free.” I’m willing to bet these messages will only increase and intensify in the months and years to come as people get poorer, hungrier, and angrier.

There’s a march in DC going on right now. FurryGirl is there and taking pictures like this one:

The demand on the banner to “STOP SHAMING US TO DEATH” is powerful, especially in conjunction with the message that “ONLY RIGHTS CAN STOP THE WRONGS”. Violence against sex workers is made too easy because of wrongheaded laws that make some people’s versions of “immorality” criminal. It’s broader than the moral or religious issues, though: it’s about class and gender — specifically denying women (1) ownership of their bodies and (2) the right to charge people to access it (3) within boundaries each woman defines for herself.

Connect the dots in the bigger picture to shaky/compromised abortion rights, our continued unwillingness to recognize parenthood as real work worthy of payment, and our refusal to protect natural resources like WATER (where ownership by one entity should be really fucking hard to claim) from unsustainable corporate exploitation compared to our insistence upon denying individual women opportunities to profit from their own individual bodies (where self-ownership should be pretty fucking OBVIOUS/undeniable, especially when you consider how much money male pro-athletes make abusing their bodies for our entertainment and no laws deny them the RIGHT to exploit their bodies in those damaging ways***) — it seems pretty obvious that denying rights to sex workers is part of a bigger agenda to deny women opportunities to profit from work that is mostly performed by women because we are at a natural biological ADVANTAGE to perform it. Basically? It’s about making sure women are only punished for their gender rather than economically rewarded for it.

It will be a cold day in hell when someone goes violently vigilante on the asses of Wall Street executives and all the corporate fat cats and bankers getting bailed out for fucking us over financially; there are always loopholes to guarantee their “right” to be multi-fucking millionaires at our expense, but there are sure to be plenty of whores killed by men who get the message loud and clear from our government(s) (and all of us who tell them we LIKE our laws just like this) that there IS no loophole for a woman who thinks she’s entitled to earning a few bucks for a blowjob. God forbid we put a cap on the exorbitant amount of ill-gotten money men “make”; instead let’s keep making sure the whores don’t get out of pocket thinking their dirty pussies are worth a thin fucking dime.

Discriminatory laws against sex work and women’s work in general don’t just encourage and facilitate physical violence, some people would say those laws and their applications are themselves acts of violence — when you make it next-to-impossible for someone to work, when you take away her income, when you stigmatize someone by slapping a criminal record or a special stripper/whore license on her that will limit her job opportunities in the future, when you eat up her time in court and behind bars, when you make her pay fines, when you make her vulnerable to blackmail by thieves and rapists both in and out of uniform, that can at LEAST be called a hostile and dangerous violence-breeding atmosphere. Whether or not you believe Deborah Jeane Palfrey’s death was a suicide, you have to recognize that she (and possibly other women connected to her case) would not be dead now if women had the right to do sex work. Who needs the Green River Killer to cleanse the country of garbage as long as we have the government to ruin and destroy the lives of sex workers? And when I say “government”, I don’t mean that the rest of us have clean hands. Voters are the ones who had an opportunity in San Francisco last month to decriminalize prostitution and guess what? THEY DIDN’T. We’re not talking about old laws no one enforces anymore, we’re talking about active BULLSHIT that just keeps on trucking.

Yes, it’s impossible for me to calmly deliver a moderate, easy-to-understand argument about sex worker rights and reducing violence perpetrated against sex workers. I’m sorry for that. I feel guilty for not doing more for sex workers as a group — for not being more of an activist, for not staying better informed, for not being a more coherent educator. As with any minority suffering discrimination and persecution, it’s a challenge to have time to earn a living in that discriminatory atmosphere AND be an agent of change. That’s why discrimination and marginalization WORK SO WELL; when people are underprivileged and denied rights granted to others, they 1) lack the resources to effectively fight for change, and 2) can’t be completely honest or open about their own stories without fear of reprisals and punishment. It’s true that I feel relatively safe as a webwhore, but I said RELATIVELY safe, not just-plain-SAFE. I realize I am VERY lucky, but still vulnerable.

I hate that my blog entries on this subject wind up preaching to the choir and are probably ignored or misunderstood by everyone else, but seriously — this whore needs to spend the rest of the day trying to make money rather than blowing off steam just to hear her head rattle. With the poor economy and my own situation of having gone deeply into credit card debt to finance our business, I do have a heightened awareness of how my own safety and standing in society is threatened even more by the fact that I’m a sex worker and therefore considered disposable and fair game for scapegoating, at the very least. I know from my OWN feelings of jealousy towards people who are economically privileged and resentment towards those protected enough by their gender and class to get away with huge scams that are considered legit ways to fuck people for money that we all can become very, ummmm, mean-spirited when the chips are down.

I wish I could wrap this up with a big Christmas bow that would change the world for sex workers or at least make people WANT to see that happen, but I’m at a loss for how to do that so I will simply say THANK YOU to the people who are out their lobbying for change on behalf of me and other sex workers today.

***there are definitely class (and race) issues at work that allow mostly poor men of color to beat each other senseless in boxing rings and suffer tons of injuries in other pro sports with regulations that do very little to protect them; by bringing this up I’m not saying boxing or other sports should be illegal or even necessarily more heavily regulated — I only mention it as an interesting comparison to sex work. It illustrates the irrationally contradictory double standards when it comes to women’s bodies versus men’s bodies and what kind of work they can put them to for how much money.

This is a long-ass entry. I already cut out a lot and saved it for future entries, but I was still left with all of this, so be forewarned; it’s not a quick read:

When we started letting friends know that Delia identifies as a woman and decided to transition from presenting as a man to living as a woman, one of the first questions was from a friend who sent this to me:

So now the million $ question:
Do you think of yourself as a lesbian?

The short answer? No. I do not think of myself as a lesbian. I never have and I never will.

Sorry to disappoint folks who were looking for a juicy DELIA: MY TRANSSEXUAL GIRLFRIEND AND HOW OUR LIVES ARE NOW A CRAZY LESBIAN FUCK-PARTY! entry, but her transition doesn’t change my sexual orientation, nor does it change hers. I didn’t grow up feeling “different” (not because of my sexual preferences, anyway; I felt different in other ways, but those are different subjects). I have always been hot for men, starting with Elvis, little boys in the neighborhood, and hot ethnic dudes from seventies television like Erik Estrada on Chips (wheeee tight black gloves!), Chico (see Chico and the Man), and Epstein on Welcome Back Kotter. Real LESBIANS do not grow up feeling “hot for dudes”. Seriously, just looking at those images makes me hot in a special way reserved for triggers set early in girlhood. Of course, I’m rather partial to men’s mouths when they look suspiciously like hot pussy: full, juicy, blood-infused lips decorated with hair (see also, Isaac on Love Boat: that kind of mustache always gives me a big fucking clit boner). And I can’t deny that I had a very special, tingly interest in Jo/Nancy McKeon on Facts of Life. And Blair. And titties. And naked girls in magazines. Yes, the “Jo” archetype has been in many of my lesbo masturbation fantasies, only the setting is less boarding school and more prison.

So what IS my sexual preference? For most of my adult life I’ve been in the “it’s all good” category; I identify myself as omnisexual (aka pansexual). I’m what most people call “bisexual”, but have never liked that label: first, because I objected to wearing a special designation that seems to say I’m “different” from the majority of people (when I emphatically believe MOST people are just plain SEXUAL), and later because it assumes we only have two options to choose from. In a pinch, though, I will call myself bisexual because it’s the most efficient, accurate way for me to identify my sexuality to lots of people who aren’t familiar with all of these nuances and super-cool labels. Whenever time allows and it’s possible (during conversations or chat sessions rather than check-marking boxes on forms that never have enough options) I do try to remind people there are alternatives to the limited, oversimplified notions of sexuality and gender most of us were raised to accept.

The first time my sexual preference was called into question was in elementary school in the seventies. My friend, Irene, and I had been playing our special game of “Elvis” with each other since we were four or five and continued through fifth or sixth grade. One night at her house after we got done humping each other, she was overcome with guilt and teared up, confronting me with the weirdest question I’d ever heard in my life:

“Trixie . . . you know we’re gay, don’t you?”

Ummmmm . . . actually, no. No I did not know that. And I told her so.

Let me clarify; I didn’t tell her that I wasn’t aware we were gay, as in “wow, Irene! So *that’s* what we are! Because I’ve really been wondering; thanks for clearing that up!”. I told her we WERE NOT gay. Even with my very limited idea of what “gay” meant, I knew I wasn’t. I knew what we were doing was normal even though I knew it wasn’t something we were supposed to tell everybody about. I looked forward to doing it, it was fun, and hey, we were playing Elvis, right? Elvis was a guy that all women wanted to do it with, so how could that be gay?

She reminded me that the big girls at school had called us gay when they saw us holding hands with each other in the hallway and I tried to reassure her that they were just mean. There’s nothing WRONG with friends holding hands! I knew intuitively that we were basically just little girls (fourth grade, I think) who loved each other in a way that couldn’t possibly be that weird. Again, I wouldn’t have wanted the big girls with the feathered hair to SEE us humping each other, but that was none of their business. Their world wasn’t my world — those girls were people to be avoided or stared at because they were pretty but they were in no position to know who we were or call us grown-up names. Also, they were stupid — the kinds of girls who would never win a spelling bee (they’re actually dead now and the little know-it-all in me attributes their early deaths to their own stupidity, but it was really much sadder than being dumb and I didn’t know them well enough to gauge that anyway; one of them actually wound up with her severed head stuck up high in a tree, but I digress).

In fact, Irene was pretty stupid too. I think I believed that if it had never occurred to me to worry about this “gay” thing myself, it couldn’t possibly be something to concern ourselves with. I was the smart one who tried to spend all of her recesses in the library reading dirty books, so it felt natural to conclude that Irene was just wrong and had a stupid thought in her head. I’d already seen her make a million stupid tear-stained mistakes in our short lives, like the time she wanted to steal candy in the drugstore WHILE WE WERE WITH HER MOM after the guy at the dry goods store failed to bestow his customary free suckers on us. She tried to convince me to steal, then as soon as we were out the door she broke down crying and confessed to her mom. Whaaaaaaaaat a dumb ass! Seriously, I couldn’t believe the way she operated sometimes.

I’m only now considering the possibility that maybe I was wrong. Not about my own regular brand of opportunistic sexuality, but about hers. After all, SHE always insisted on being Elvis while I was always in the Ann-Margret role (”woman” astride, though). I never really challenged her too much on that because the action itself along with the thought of Elvis was fulfilling enough for me. I guess I just thought she LOOKED a lot like Elvis (not in a butch way, she just has the same exact mouth as him) so it made sense at the time. As an adult I *have* wondered where she got some of her ideas; we were about five when she told me that “Elvis always pees on his girlfriends.” which now does seem like an advanced concept for one so young; one secret (of perhaps many) Irene DID manage to keep from her mom was how the Bugs Bunny beach towel got completely soaked with piss.

I wonder if Irene knew she was gay all along and I totally dismissed what she might have realized from the beginning. She went on to do all the things straight girls did in rural high schools in the late eighties: drinking, fucking and frosting her hair. Now she’s married with kids. I even went to her wedding chock full of those sick Bible verses about the husband submitting to God and the wife submitting to her husband, followed by a reception full of their wasted relatives raging about that dirty fucking Bill Clinton and how he should be impeached . . . or shot! I still love Irene and hope to Christ she’s NOT gay and stuck in a straight
marriage with me being the only pussy she ever got. That would be tragic. I’m pretty sure I called it right back in elementary school, though, and that she just let what those mean girls said bother her. Sex play with same-sex childhood friends, even if it continues into your teens, is not a good predictor of sexual preference just like GENDER is not a good predictor of sexual preference.

I know I didn’t have enough information to really understand what Irene was worried about back then; we grew up with no internet, no same-sex kissing on tv, no real discussion of any of those things. I’d never been exposed to people being called names like “faggot”, but of course I realized and accepted that grown-ups “did it” in male/female pairs even if I had no awareness of a group of grown-up people who did it (and were discriminated against for doing it) the same way Irene and I did. I don’t know if I’d ever heard my parents talk about gay people and if we knew any, I wasn’t aware of it. I totally thought Billy Crystal was cute/sexy on “Soap” and didn’t understand ANYTHING about the show other than that I liked watching him. I didn’t know he was playing one of the first openly gay characters on television – I had no conscious understanding of that.

In kindergarten there was one kid who was clearly DIFFERENT, but I just thought he was obnoxious and then he moved to another school so I didn’t find out until many years later that he was gay; The memory of how he stood out is still so vivid to me, his shiny orange hair contrasted with his green turtleneck, his flair for the dramatic, his isolation . . . he was SO gay from the very beginning. As a teenager I remember when Donahue had some lesbians on his show and they explained that when most girls played with their Barbie dolls, Barbie and Ken wound up getting it on, but they were different because when THEY played Barbies, it was Skipper and Barbie who always wound up pressed against each other. Even with all the humping Irene and I did on each other, it never dawned on me to use Skipper like that when there was a KEN doll around.

It’s things like that — people being obviously queer and having to deal with identifying and coping with that difference their entire childhood — that make me adamantly opposed to ever calling myself a lesbian. Spending the rest of my life with someone who identifies as a woman — who I fell in love with because she was NOT exactly a man — will not make me a lesbian, and it’s not because she’s trans; I would say the same thing if she were born with a pussy. I will not call myself a lesbian because, aside from not being one, “lesbian” is a political word representing a minority with a set of experiences that I never had — never could have — because I have always felt myself part of the majority when it comes to the genders of people I like to have sex with.

Having said that, when I was in college I *did* come out to my friends and family as bisexual. I know, it sounds like no big thing today but things have changed a lot in the past fifteen years, you know? It wasn’t super hard or anything, but it was important enough that I thought the people closest to me should know that I might bring a chick home someday. I’d been aware since I was seventeen that women turned me on even when they weren’t pretending to be Elvis (did I already tell you about this orgasmic epiphany I had when I went to Girls’ State? I feel like I did, but if so, I can’t find where I posted it), but it took me awhile longer to even imagine having a “girlfriend”. Of course, everyone in college thought I was a lesbian anyway. Everyone EXCEPT for the handful of lesbians, so let’s just say college was one big dry spell for me.

Even though I consider myself omnisexual or pansexual, I can’t say that I’m AS sexually attracted to women as to men, and up until recently I had almost no concept of the spectrum of transgender beyond cross-dressers or a remote acknowledgment of “bizarre medical cases” totally far removed from my reality so my fantasy life hasn’t included trans people (except crossdressers). Transgender is something I’ve been ignorant and unaware of most of my life, so I definitely can’t say that I’m equally attracted to trans people as to bio men who present as men (most of the time, anyway). I did really love watching Bosom Buddies, of course, and found the guys way hotter when they were dressed up than when they were just boring dudes, but I think I always wanted them to ONLY be wearing the glossy lipstick and some girl clothes WITHOUT the wigs and the earrings. And for the both of them to be fucking Donna Dixon while they were in half-drag.

So yeah . . . my preference is more on the straight side of the continuum; I have a primal response to Elvis, Ponch, Chico, and Epstein that’s more intensely sexual than the one I have to Jo, Ginger (Gilligan’s Island) and Salma Hayak. Lately most of the time when I fantasize about fucking someone new, it’s guys or FTM people. That’s a shift from before Delia and I got together when I spent more time fantasizing about women than I do now. Why do I think more about hooking up with men or transmen these days? PROBABLY BECAUSE I’VE BEEN FUCKING A TRANSWOMAN FOR SIX YEARS. And back when I spent time longing for women, I was mostly fucking guys.

Even though I’m not a lesbian, I don’t think of myself as straight, either. In fact, my feathers were ruffled recently at a GLBT meeting when someone referred to Delia and I as a straight couple. Yes, I have grown up enjoying and feeling entitled to the privileges straight people have in our society, but we are not a straight couple. I’m not straight, she’s not straight, our relationship is not straight, and our jobs are not straight. We are not a straight couple. I don’t want to be called a lesbian couple (I was totally confused when I heard a transwoman referring to her work with her female partner as “lesbian porn”) but not being lesbian doesn’t automatically make us straight.

Still, it was pretty wacky last year when we went to a GLBT event right after Delia decided to transition and I felt like an intruder, not because anyone treated me like one, but because I kind of AM an intruder. I know that the “B” in GLBT stands for me and I know that I just said I’m not straight, but the room was small and I felt like I was taking up space someone else might have NEEDED and DESERVED more than I did. As a woman, I feel really strongly that people in minority groups have protected spaces with good energy from people who GET what it’s like to be where they’re at and where they’ve been. Like I said before, I didn’t grow up feeling “different” (I don’t FEEL like bisexuality is a minor preference, even though I know that the political reality is that it’s not accepted when it’s anything more than two girls dabbling but running straight home to the cock after they “experiment” and “get it out of their systems”) so it was weird to be in that room and for the first time automatically qualify on what felt like a technicality — because my partner’s trans. At the time I wasn’t sure I had anything to offer or anything I could rightfully gain from throwing myself into the GLBT mix.

Or maybe it was just a wake-up call, that I don’t have an excuse to avoid standing in the middle of a group of people that’s openly hated, persecuted, and targeted for special kinds of violence reserved especially for special kinds of people. I know what that feels like as a woman, a pornographer, a nerd, and a sex worker, but I exempted myself from feeling it about my sexual preference, or, more accurately my LACK of a strong preference. I could advocate and empathize — and stand safely out of harm’s way. Not anymore.

It gets tiring, too, standing in another group where I feel like a liar because my profile is different and has a bunch of things in it that I know many people would reject if only they know. Like when I go to church and feel like a liar because I don’t believe in their church God on an intellectual level the way almost everyone else does
who likes going to church. Or when I identify myself as a feminist to women who I *know* plot ways to get rid of the scourge of pornography. When the GLBT group of people sees me out and about with someone who sometimes looks like a boy and uses a boy name, I worry that they’ll think I’m a liar even though I never SAID I was a lesbian. I still cringe imagining those people and people at church and feminists all turning to look at me, aghast when they realize how I betrayed them just by walking in their midst, pretending to be one of them. A man-fucker, an atheist with a weakness for ritual and the mystical, an exploiter of women and a user of cunt, a democrat who wants to drown herself in money.

It seems like such a simple question, “are you a lesbian”. But like everything else that’s attached to someone or something I love, I feel like I need to explain how much more complex it is than yes or no. That if I don’t explain, I’ll be guilty of some deception.

*****

Just for fun, I’m imagining being offered the chance to pick someone new to be intimate with every week for a year out of everyone in the world. When I think of it that way, men and women would probably come out pretty even with some transgender competition thrown into the mix. I don’t know if that means I don’t really lean as far towards the straight side as I thought, or if that’s just a typical buffet mentality speaking where you pile a lot of different things on your plate that you might not have ordered if you could only pick three or four of them. I’m a sucker for a buffet, though. A good (or even a mediocre) buffet is my idea of heaven. Damn, I’m hungry.

Tonight’s ending on a very positive note that could even be viewed as a metaphor for other things going on in our lives; we finally installed a second hard drive for storage on my main work machine so I’m moving big files off my weighted-down C drive. It feels like a fresh start! Right now I’m filling up some of that space by transferring non-work photos over to this machine so I can enjoy playing with shots we’ve taken for fun/to learn about our camera.

November 20th: a buck Delia spotted in our neighbor’s backyard:

Our “new” camera (Nikon D300) has been therapeutic for me, making me stop and take time out to really LOOK and lose myself in details outside of myself. I’m not the kind of person who tries to capture EVERYTHING with a camera — I definitely appreciate being in the moment with family, friends and on vacation — but when we’re at home (which is the same as being at work unless we make a really concerted effort for it not to be) doing the daily grind it’s a big challenge for me to get out of my head. But now, when something mundane and beautiful captures my attention I feel justified in grabbing the camera, ostensibly to learn to take better photographs, and spending 5-20 minutes to really SEE and try to understand what I’m seeing: the light, the textures, the motion . . . challenging myself over what’s real and not real because it can look so different viewed with my eyes compared to how it’s captured by the camera. Immersing myself in all those different versions of truth and light and darkness and the stories we instantly create and details we insert after pulling them out of our asses when we think we’re looking at our surroundings.

Looking out our window a few hours ago:

We actually bought three 500 GB hard drives months ago for three different machines and up until today, had only installed ONE of them because of little nuisances like not having Dell’s annoying little drive “caddies”, not having serial ATA cables with the 90 to 180 degree corner jobbies so the case will close properly, me despising crawling around on the floor fucking with all the cables and cords tangled around dust bunnies, etc. If you heard me screaming last night it was when I bashed my elbow into the corner of my desk during that process. Anyway, we finally took care of it and I ordered everything we need to install a couple more on other machines.

The past couple of days I had the alarm set for 8:30 in the morning to try to get us back into a groove of semi-normalcy; at least I *thought* I set the alarm for 8:30. Turns out I forgot to adjust the ipod when the time changed so we were actually being woken up at 7:30 which just didn’t feel right. We’ll try again tomorrow. Maybe I’ll even start my day by going outside with the camera.

November 2nd as the sun took a dive:

And now a couple of random notes:

*Check out Delia’s post about today being the Transgender Day of Remembrance (and way to go Governor Gregoire for signing the proclamation – the most we could have expected Dino Rossi to do would have probably been to wipe his ass with it).

*Last night I enjoyed a conversation with my wanker in which I wasted lots of time raving about this Teddy Thompson fellow and a performance we saw on Later with Jools Holland. Here it is, and it slays me:

I’ve only downloaded one of his songs (a cover of “She Thinks I Still Care”, one of my all-time faves) because there’s no way I can narrow it down so I’m trying to hold out to be able to buy some of his albums, though I will probably download his cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Tonight Will Be Fine”:

I don’t know why I assumed my dad would be buried with his Masonic ring since I knew it was a family heirloom that had been passed down to him from his dad, so it was both a blessing AND a surprise when my aunt, mom and sister all agreed I should have it. Normally I keep it on my “altar” with other trinkets and items of greater and lesser power. Here it is (upside down; sorry):

I have no idea what the monetary value is of this ring (nothing extraordinary), but it was the fanciest piece of jewelry anyone had in my family and the only diamond I ever felt familiar with. It was ALWAYS present on my dad’s hand and seemed imbued with secret, mystical powers.

It’s totally against the rules for me to wear it since I’m not a Mason and not a man, but sometimes I do it anyway to have my dad present. I wore it on a chain to my sister’s wedding, and sometimes I wear it on my finger when I want to have him near me. I’ve put it on at times when I needed to be reminded of the depth of his values, patience, kindness and boundless love for others. His vehement opposition to hatred and distaste for petty anger, mean-spirited criticism and silly conflicts. When I need a reminder to be a better person and my dad isn’t here to do it for me, I put on his ring. I should do it more often.

I wear it pointed at me so I can look at it the way I saw it on his finger, pointed out because he was a past Master. I’m wearing it today because I know how excited and happy he would have been to vote for Obama. I know how he would celebrate the progress being made and be proud to be part of these positive steps forward in history. One of the things that bothered my dad about Masonry was the segregation (white lodges and black lodges) and the really ugly, racist history and associations a lot of Masonic groups and individuals have.

During my dad’s life they’d at least gotten to the point where they recognized each other’s lodges and visited each other, but it was still really . . . ummmm . . . old-fashioned. When my dad was still mobile he took to visiting a black lodge in Seattle regularly and petitioned for membership there — the first white guy to do that (how welcome that idea was to the Prince Hall Masons I don’t know; if they were opposed to it my dad was totally oblivious to that). It was our state’s white Masons, though, who made up some bullshit to block him having a dual membership (I can’t remember the details and only happened upon them when I was going through his papers; if I remember correctly they lied and said he wasn’t a member in good standing with the state; of course there may have been a lot more to it behind the scenes that I don’t know about). My dad just contented himself with his honorary membership and waved off my protestations as stupid politics when I asked him “what the fuck??”

My dad is the one I went with the first time I voted for a president. We were SO excited about Clinton and I was SO young and optimistic I really felt hope in the marrow of my bones. I was positively WIGGY with optimism! Like a lot of people, I’ve naturally lost that feeling as I’ve gotten older and seen how even the good guys, when they’re ALLOWED to do their jobs, aren’t really all for progress and the last two presidential elections have been enough to seal me permanently in cynicism. I’m not even sure I will be able to feel anything more exciting than RELIEF if/when Obama wins. Not relief that everything or even most things will get better, but just a small assurance that I’m not living in a country dominated by the hopelessly brainwashed and criminally selfish. Relief that we can at least be proud of doing SOMETHING right.

I wish my dad could be here for this because his enthusiasm wouldn’t be tempered by my black-spirited pessimism. I really wish my whole family were together for this and there would be hugs all around and crying and hysterical joy that we would always remember sharing together. Maybe we can get together on Inauguration Day. But today, tonight, and tomorrow I’m wearing my dad’s ring and inviting him to be present when Delia and I celebrate here at home together. I hope.