Thoughts on the Iron Pentacle: Sex, Birth, Ancestors, and Age Play

Orange rose – A dark orange-red rose in full bloom, surround by green foliage. Photo by Sabina Bajracharya, via Wiki Free Images.

So it’s October. Samhain is coming. And I’ve started listening to Pavani Moray’s podcast, Bespoken Bones (also linked in my Blogs And Pods list, on the right).

It’s a podcast about (1) sexuality, sexual healing, and sexual pleasure, but also (2) ancestors, transgenerational(?) sexual mores, and practices like ancestor veneration. I find this just an absolutely fascinating combination for a bunch of reasons. So I thought I’d just use this as a jumping off point and talk about this stuff for a little bit.

First thing, you may have seen on my instagram a few days ago that I posted a cover shot of Jane Meredith’ and Gede Parma’s book, Magic of the Iron Pentacle: Reclaiming Sex, Pride, Self, Power, and Passion. In the post, I mentioned that I wasn’t too deep into it yet. What I didn’t say was that the reason I wasn’t too deep into it yet was that I got part-way through the first chapter, the Sex chapter, and just started balking.

And I was balking, for the most part, at Jane Meredith’s essay about birth as part of sex.

And, like, yes, part of that was that there was some biological reductionism going on there which, particularly in a book with at least one queer author, I found more than a little disappointing, but I want to try and unpack what else was bugging me about that chapter.

So, to begin: My understanding, such as it is, of the Iron Pentacle, is that the whole point of having those specific five things as its elements is that they are things that are often demonized (literally or not) by Christianity, and as such by cultural-Christianity, particularly when it comes to marginalized people who are expected to feel shame around their own existence in the world for their (our) “failure” to be Real Human Beings (cis, het, abled, neurotypical, white, men).

And, I mean, I do realize that I’ve spent a long time conflating Feri – the magico-religious tradition where the Iron Pentacle comes from – with the Radical Faries, who are a queer new-age-ish, contemporary-pagan-ish, secular-spiritual-ish bunch of loosely-affiliated counter-cultural groups that reject homonormativity and the idea that gay people are Just Like Everybody Else (Everybody Else meaning straight, monogamously-married, would-be parents).

Like, yes there’s definitely overlap between those communities.

But also my long-time assumption that Feri came from the Radical Fairies is (a) maaaaaybe not actually the case, but also (b) kind of colouring my expectations for what I’ll find in a book on the Iron Pentacle.

Secondly: I’m a cis lady. More specifically, I’m a cis, white, middle-class-raised, university-educated lady. Which means I spent the first 28 years of my life under the expectation that, between the age of 20 and 30, I would get pregnant and give vaginal birth, ideally 2-3 times, and that if I failed to do this I was somehow both failing to Gender Correctly and letting a bunch of people down whose own identities, for some reason, were heavily invested in my reproductive capacity.

At twenty-eight, I came the conclusion that (a) I didn’t actually want to have kids, (b) my bisexuality was way gayer than I’d initially thought, and (c) I would be better off in non-monogamous relationships. So I got the heck divorced and started dating other polyamourous women and, while this didn’t mean I got to stop being vigilant about avoiding pregnancy, my various girlfriends and other partners have never seen my intentionally-child-free status as some kind of a deliberate afront to their own life goals or gender identities. Thank all the gods.

What I’m saying is that, while having my own sexual desires (let alone acting on them) was, for a long time, something that I was taught to keep my mouth shut about and to sort of go along to get along, if you will, my early belief that I did want to birth babies and raise children was always treated by others as a part of myself that I should embrace, and it was my rejection of that belief, when I realized that it wasn’t true, that was “radical” or “subversive” or otherwise pushing outside of what Gayle Rubin calls the Charmed Circle of Acceptable Human Sexuality.

Seriously. Dating women, and being fairly loud about it, is probably the main reason I’m not getting any questions from random co-workers and/or relatives about “So… why don’t you have kids yet??” because being a big homo also puts me outside of that Charmed Circle AND, up until very, very recently, would have meant that any children I did want to have would have been forbidden to me by the state due to lesbianism making one an unfit mother.

So, for all of these reasons, I was surprised and frankly put off by seeing “Let’s reclaim birth-giving as part of sexuality!”

And yet.

My culture tends to go really hard on the idea of separating “mother” and “whore” or – to put it more broadly – “virtuous woman who genders properly” and “unvirtuous woman who breaks femininity through her unladylike behaviour”.

All that ways that Black and Indigenous women are hypersexualized by white people, have their sexual consent ignored, have their children stolen from them in a million directly and indirectly lethal ways, have their motherhood disregarded or else treated as pathological or even parasitic. All the ways that poor women are characterized as slutty, how deliberate sexuality is cast as “low class”, how the lives of sexworkers of every gender, are treated as utterly disposable, how women with a history of sexwork, or sexual voraciouness, are often fired, or won’t be hired, how they lose class mobility and economic security if their sexuality is seen as not belonging to one specific male individual. How sexworkers have their kids taken away. How little girls are held responsible, and characterized as sluts, when grown adults rape them. How a million, zillion “sex after parenthood” books have to address the “but I’m a mom, I’m not supposed to want that…” element of getting your (monogamous, vanilla, hetero-married) sex life back once there are kids sleeping down the hall. The way that birth is sanitized in pop culture, having all the (vast, vast) sweating, bleeding, shitting, bodily messiness of it airbrushed right on out.

So it’s not entirely weird that one might want to write, or build into one’s spiritual practice, a reminder that “birth is part of sex”.

And it’s not weird that “Sex”, when defined as (among other things) the Creative Power of the Universe, would include the actual creation of other lives.

But it still felt really weird to run into this so directly.

 

Sliding back to Bespoken Bones for a bit, and the way that sacred sexuality can be related to ancestor veneration.

So, this is kind of two things.

Like, we have our ancestors of biology – the literal human, and otherwise evolutionary, lineages that resulted in our respective living human bodies. The story that Starhawk tells, in Earth Path about The Oldest Ancestors, and they way they shared breath, green to red to green, and the way we still do that with out plant-kingdom cousins every time we, ourselves, breathe in, breathe out, breathe in. The way I wonder how my pre-Christian, and even just pre-Reformation (pre-machanized worldview) folk-Christianity-practicing, ancestors related to and with the other lives around them. The way my wife told me that she could smell the earth on my maternal grandfather – not in the sense of literal dirt, but in the sense that my mom’s dad, even after he stopped farming in his mid-60s, spent his whole life in a relationship with the ground under his feet. The way I can see my ancestors faces in my own reflection and in the ways people paint and draw me in their art classes.

That I wouldn’t be here if not for these specific chains of birth and sex and birth and sex and birth that have resulted in me, that continue to result in my nibblings and second generation cousins.

But there’s also our ancestors of spirit, to use (iirc) Lee Harrington’s term. What Katheryn Payne is talking about, in her Brazen Femme essay, “Whores and Bitches Who Sleep With Women”, when she asks “Do you know your lineage?”

The queer femmes who came before me and gave me words for what I am. The leather dykes and the femme dyke sex workers who kept a space for me to step into when so much of the rest of feminism was trying really hard to make us disappear. The second wave feminist, lesbian goddess worshippers whose writing – so much of it published right around when I was born – I found in my local public library and read over and over again in my teens. The poets, almost all of them queer as hell, who taught me how to be a poet. The kinky spirit workers and ordeal facilitators whose work introduced me to the whole realm of sacred sexuality that exists beyond the chalice and the blade.

Ancestors who I trace through communities of sexual affinity as much as I trace them through anything else.

So these are two ways that sex and ancestry are related to each other.

 

And then I listen to Lee Harrington’s interview with Pavani on this podcast, and he talks about making explicitly sexual offerings, on a regular basis, to spirits and deities who have traditionally watched over queer people or who have been called to in queer ritual and queer mysteries.

And I wonder if my own lady of sexual sovereignty would enjoy something like that (and then I get an immediate answer of Yes flashing through the back of my head, more than once, so… apparently I have something to add to my practices).

And then I wonder about my lady of queerness – who for Reasons that I’ll get to in a second – would also want something like this. And then I think about the ways that I recognize her as sensual, and recognize some of my interactions with her as sexual or sexually charged, but haven’t tended to think of her as explicitly a Goddess of Sex, even though she is both a goddess of queer desire AND a goddess of birth (and aiding in birth), which kind of does bring me back to that whole Iron Pentacle situation again. Oh, hai.

So that’s something to think about.

 

To take things (maybe?) a step farther:

Back in… late August, iirc, I got to take an online workshop with Lee Harrington about sex magic. One of the things that came up, however briefly, in the discussion was the possibility of using sex magic specifically as a battery for destructive magic. For letting go, for releasing (hahaha…) people or events or emotional/physical/somatic Stuff. Storm Faerywolf describes the point of orgasm as the moment when we enter into constant dance of creation-and-destruction-and-creation[1], so I can see how that would work.

And I think about this, and about the ways that sexual trauma can be intergenerational whether or not incest is a thing in your particular family.

I think about how, after a particular relative died, my grandmother felt at liberty to tell my mom The Family Secret (in-so-far as it was a secret, which apparently, not so much). And my mom told me.

And I thought: That explains a LOT.

I think about how, years and years and YEARS later, the ritual I did using sex magic to “puncture my tank” in order to free up space for a better relationship to my own sexuality unexpectedly, wound up including me making a heartfelt phone call, if you want to call it that, to my maternal great-grandmother (who at least knew me in life) and to her mother, my great-great-grandmother, and telling them:

This shouldn’t have happened to you. I’m glad I’m alive, and that I’m the person I am, and that I have you as ancestors, even though it means I also have a rapist as an ancestor, but that doesn’t make your rape your fault, it doesn’t mean you deserved it. And it doesn’t mean you deserved to have your mother-daughter relationships fucked up all the way down our whole family line. None of us deserved that, and that includes you. That shouldn’t have happened to you, and I’m sorry it did.

I really hope they heard me.

And I really hope they believe me.

 

… So.

Not exactly sex magic. But a ritual that involved it, and also involved talking to my biological ancestors. So… they can be combined. Apparently.

And then.

And then I take this a step farther. A step farther in a different direction, maybe, but still a step farther. And I think about age play. How being a Mommy, in the D/s sense, is having a net-positive effect on my own attachment Issues when my relationship with my Actual Mom was pretty fraught for about 3/4 of my life-to-date and has only recently started feeling comfortable after decades of feeling anything but. How, too, being in this explicitly sexual – and spiritually-sexual – relationship with someone who calls me “Mommy” is also potentially a path towards understanding and better-relating-to my Fetch, which is to say the part of my soul who is my inner child, my sexual self, and my shadow (all the parts of me I reject or keep hidden) all wrapped up in one gangly, adolescent-looking being.

Not entirely sure about that last bit, but… it feels relevant. It feels likely.

So I’m going with it.

 

Anyway.

Obviously this is all rambling Things And Stuff. But it was on my mind, and I wanted to talk about it. Maybe I’ll talk about it more later on.

But, for the moment, thank you for listening.

 

Cheers,

Ms Syren.

 

[1] Now I’m thinking of Neil Gaiman’s Endless, and how Destruction went off to build stuff, saying that every act of creation is also an act of destruction.

Remembering Corey Alexander (@TGStoneButch / Xan West)

Lit tea light candles against a dark background

 
I got some bad news yesterday.
It’s sort of the way of the internet that sometimes we miss things, or find things, totally by chance.
I found out, totally by chance – because a fellow kinky queer author had posted a screen-shot of someone else’s twitter post to instagram, of all things – that another fellow kinky queer author has died.
 
Corey Alexander – a writer that you may know as blogger TGStoneButch or under the pen name Xan West – was found dead in their apartment, apparently due to complications related to diabetes.
 
There’s been a go-fund-me to cover their funeral expenses (information here) which I think has been fully funded and, as such, has been paused (rather than taken down – possibly because there may be further, unexpected expenses to cover. Not sure).
For folks who want to make in-memorium donations, there’s a list in the works and I’ll update this post once it becomes available.
In the interim, and while the above go-fund-me is paused, I’ve been told that donations to trans lifeline, in Corey’s name, would be welcome.
Donating to a disability justice org of your choice would also be a way to honour their memory, as would just… offering some cash to help another disabled or chronically ill trans person cover their medical expenses (hit up #TransCrowdFund and/or #DisabilityCrowdFund on twitter to help someone out directly).
 
If you are a fan of their work and have questions about their author-estate, there is an FAQ here. Needless to say, there are other things taking priority right now, so please be considerate and be patient.
 
Shira Glassman has opened a virtual room in-which to sit shivah (link goes to information, not to the zoom-room itself).
 
There will be a virtual Minchah and Kaddish for them (link goes to information) this Friday, August 21, at 4:30pm EDT, to-which all are welcome.
So, y’know, I know what I’m doing this Friday, as it turns out.
 
There is a virtual guest-book where you can post brief messages and memories of Corey (and if you are like me and “only” knew them online, that still counts).
This is what I wrote.

I didn’t know Corey particularly well, but we’d been aware of each other for years. Shop talk on twitter and comments on each other’s blog posts, that kind of thing. Their writing on the vulnerability of dominance and the violent desires of sadism, as well as their work to challenge the fantasy image of dominants, tops, and sadists as inscrutable, consistently confident, and without needs or fears, has both helped me find words to put around my own experiences, and pushed me in terms of my own writing. I’m so sorry they’ve died. They remain an inspiration and I’ll miss their thoughtful presence in my life.

 
It was a short message, and I guess I want to elaborate a little bit.
I would feel very presumptuous calling Corey my friend. We didn’t know each other like that. But friendly acquaintance, peer and colleague? Yes. For years. I was part of the blog hop they did to promote their book, Show Yourself To Me. Their writing has influenced and informed my own.
 
Like I said, they gave me language and a way of talking about how embodying and existing within my own insatiable, violent desire is a vulnerable position to occupy. They helped me notice the ways that, oh, gosh, how do I name this… “dom-normativity”? Subcultural social expectations of Dominant Behaviour? …how That Stuff maps onto heteronormativity and expectations around what it means to be (conventionally) masculine which, in turn, helped me dig further into what it means for me, as a Femme, to cultivate and nurture my (sense of consensual) entitlement as a Domme and the reasons why my dominance-as-practice sometimes fails to resonate with, or mirror, the ways dominance is conventionally portrayed (in, say, BDSM porn or in people’s workshop-presenter bios)[1].
 
Weirdly – or maybe not so weirdly, synergy being what it is – their writing about being Butch (like the writing of other leather butches, as it turns out) has given me ways to articulate elements and aspects of my own Femme identity, leather and otherwise, about being “all mouth” and yet having my teeth clamped shut, about the ways that feminine appetite is coded as monstrous and how that affects me (and expectations directed at me) as a dominant, sadistic woman who is both emphatically queer and somewhat “conventional” in the outward presentation of my (Middle-Aged, Nice White Lady) femininity[2].
 
I’m sorry they’ve died. Far too young. They were kind and thoughtful in my interactions with them. I liked their brain and what they had to say. I think what they had to say was important.
What can we do but continue to explore this stuff, continue to name it and bring it to the foreground? What can we do but pick up their Work and carry it on?
 

For Corey Alexander[3]
 
[…]
Cicadas howling
their brief lives
in summer heat
A visceral response
 
to a death not theirs
but mine
to mourn
It would be presumptuous
to call you friend
or back from the dead
demand my old colleague
come to my candle
be present
in the recounting of the stories
 
you wrote
But you’re in every word
[…]

 
 
See you at their memorial,
Ms Syren.
 
 
[1] I guarantee you there are going to be more posts on that one, as it is a long and on-going trip.
 
[2] My day-to-day dress, on those occasions when I leave the house, looks more and more like Gothabilly Lite or Office Witch, than the leopard print and mini skirts of what I think of as “Classic Femme” or the lingerie-as-outerwear and oil-slick lipstick of my early 20s.
 
[3] This is a chunk of a drafted glosa (on Liza Rankow’s “Femme Poem 1”) I wrote, yesterday, in the wake of learning of their death.

Building Lateral Family (Here Be Feeeeelings)

So. This isn’t entirely in line with the themes of this blog, but it doesn’t totally fit with Urban Meliad either. I’m putting it here because it’s been a while and because… Because The Season Of Light started over a month ago and I’m having Polyam Feels and chewing on that thing where “queer adulthood” runs on a different time-line and frequently doesn’t necessarily include some of the major markers of “adulthood” (like monogamously pairing off, or having babies) that our cultures (cultures-of-origin?? I don’t even know) pass down to us.
 
As you folks will have probably picked up, if you’ve been reading this for a while (or know me In Real Life), my relationship with my mom is… substantially, noticeably, blessedly better than it was twenty years ago. And even ten years ago. But it’s still got some fraught elements.
Hoy.
I tell you.
Look. At this point, I can kind of laugh about it. It’s been 20 years of figuring out how to navigate this as two adults (Okay… 19 is maybe not an “adult” in anything but the legal sense, but you get the idea) who live in different places, and I can kind of see the humour in my mom being My Mom.
But it’s also kind of hard.
 
It’s weird how things line up. And I know I’m doing this in-around U.S. Thanksgiving. I’m writing in Canada, so the timing is entirely random. But it means there might be at least a few readers who can relate to this pretty hard right at the moment.
 
On the one hand: My mom is super game to include one of my metamours – and probably more than one, if her open door policy during my high school years is anything to go by – in her Xmas and Thanksgiving and similar celebratory-meal plans. She’s done up stockings for C to open multiple years in a row now.
Which, I realize, is fucking rare.
There aren’t a lot of polyamourous people whose parents are down to hang out with their kid-in-law’s other partners, so that’s pretty great.
On the other hand: Her reaction to me having more than one partner at a time was – last time this happened – to blink at me, murmur “I guess I thought you’d get tired of this”, and proceed to refer to my partner as “your friend” until the relationship… transitioned into whatever the hell it is now. Some kind of weird, slightly fraught-in-its-own-right family ties.
So we’ll see how she handles the news that I have two partners again, this time ’round.
 
I feel like a Bad Daughter.
 
I love that I make family laterally rather than in, or in addition to, inter-generational silos. But when my personal “family responsibilities” rub up against the expectations of my family of origin, I have a hard time.
I feel uncomfortable with the possibility that someone will want to know why I’m okay with dropping air fare to see my girlfriend but not okay with doing the same thing to fly out and see my sister at Christmas. (Never mind that I’m not Christian and, technically, neither is she. Never mind that leaving my wife behind to see my sister and her kids feels weird and gross in a way that leaving her behind while I see a different partner doesn’t at all).
 
I love that I’m a polytheist animist who celebrates Midwinter and builds a spider’s web of community connections with the end goal of having the venn diagram of my social groups be one big, inter-supportive circle that isn’t reliant on me to keep those connections going. But it still feels weird and uncomfortable and sad in a way I wish it didn’t, when my mom asks me what my plans for the 25th of December are and then, when I tell her my calendar is wide open that day, informs me that, actually, she’ll be in a different province, visiting the grandchildren. That all of my relatives with reliable paycheques would rather congregate in Calgary than turn up in Ottawa, where both the matriarch and the queer, low-income relatives, happen to live.
 
Sometimes I want to take a family photo.
To gather my girlfriend and my wife, and my metamours (difficult, at this point, since half of them live in one National Capital, and the rest live in DC and Baltimore), my Inheritor/Leather-Sister and my Sister-from-another-Mister who witnessed my marriage, my meta-metamours and my dom/me/s-in-law. The exes-who-are-still-family. And more: The femme poets who taught me, and their beloveds and their kids. The Yoots, who are in their 20s and even 30s now, who are raising up the cohorts coming up after them. The leather bikers who survived the plague, who are old enough to remember when being themselves wasn’t just unprotected but illegal. All my leather kin. All my queer fam. And take a fucking Sears Portrait Studio photo that we send out to all my relatives to say: THIS. This is my family. This is who danced at my wedding, right beside you. This is who I love, right alongside you.
 
I don’t want to have to ask “Is it alright if we include [metamour] in these plans?” Even knowing the answer will be “Of course!”
I want the reaction to “My vegetarian partner’s going to be visiting in late April” to be “Bring her to Easter brunch! I’m already making strata without the ham because the grand-kids’ll be here!”
 
I know that there are a LOT of queers out there who loathe Gay Marriage, and would rather burn the institution down that further infect our weird, non-traditional-family-building community with couple-privilege.
I know that there are a LOT of queers out there, too, who have little-to-nothing but shitty, invalidating-at-best memories of their families-of-origin and would rather create things newly out of whole cloth than try to create words like “unctie” so that our siblings’ kids have a word for us that fits both our genders and our fam-of-O’s kinship diagrams or structural language.
 
I have to admit… I’m not exactly on board. I want my queer fam to have words for themselves. I want them to be introduced to their nibblings as “This is Unctie So-and-so” from birth, so that it never feels strange or clunky in their mouths, so that my people can be their whole selves around their families-of-origin. I want to be able to say “wife” when I introduce my long-standing D/s partner and sweetheart. It’s just, I’d also like it if her other long-standing partners could include her as covered by their secondary-health-insurance benefits. It’s just, I’d also like it if I could say “wife” or “spouse” about more than one person at a time, should I be blessed with more than one life-partner who’s stayed with me for years, decades, my life-time, and to have those words not illicit awkward exchanges of eye-contact, or a refusal to engage, from my family-of-origin.
Most of the year, this is no big deal.
But it comes up hard when the nights get long and people start talking faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaamily.

Knowing How To Look (Femme In/Visibility)

So, a few months ago (early December), I was reading about Femme Stuff while working a reception job. I spent the whole morning reading primarily about femme invisibility and ended up writing a Twitter Thing about how the postal carrier who turned up with the mail around Noon had asked me if I’d ever considered being an actress because I was “using my facial expressions very intensely”.
What I thought was “Shit, I’m totally doing that”. But what I meant was… I’m flagging.
Flagging hard, to no-one in particular, wearing all of my sparkle on the outside because I was reading about how un-see-able I am to other queers.
 
That intense, almost theatrical, expressiveness is a thing that makes femmes intimidating and fascinating, but sometimes I wonder if that Femme Dazzling Smile (like a butch nod, if you will) that lights us up when we see each other isn’t just us saying “I See You, Femme!” but is also us asking “Do you see me?”
I mean, maybe that’s just me.
But I do wonder if we turn up the volume on our already/often pretty innate intensity, particularly in queer spaces & contexts, in the hopes of being recognized as Family when we don’t (necessarily) have fades / asymmetrical haircuts, or rock a pin-up aesthetic, or have leopard-print on that day or what-have-you. (As a side note, I have a pair of Fake Cat-Eye Glasses that I got for doing cam work, and I sometimes want wear them around town just to see how that effects the way others perceive me. I don’t know if that counts as “field work”…)
 
It’s a weird thing. Kind of nice to know that it shows up, even when I’m not consciously doing it? Kind of heart-breaking to know that I try That Hard to be visible even when there’s nobody around to see me?
 
An anecdote: Back in November, I went to a combination book-launch/dance-party/AGM/fundraiser (you know how that goes), and had all my dazzle on when I headed home afterwards. Halfway home a butch-of-a-certain-age, under a big umbrella, chatted me up for no discernible reason at all. Unexpectedly visible. Who knew?
I just about floated home. Not because that particular person was particularly exciting, just because: she (they?) recognized me well enough to flirt, noticeably, with a stranger in spite of drizzly night + my warm coat & non-heeled boots.
It was so freaking validating.
 
I’m in my late 30s. Most het-cis dudes don’t catcall me. I don’t know if that’s because I’ve “aged out” of the Easy To Intimidate range, or what (I am not complaining, if I have), but, despite that, most of the attention I get on the street is from people I’m fairly confident are cis dudes. They flock like cis dudes in their 20s who are trying to prove their manhood. Then again, maybe I think they’re cis guys because 100% of everyone else has a pretty solid idea of how uncomfortable it is to hear “How’s my wife?” from a stranger, sooo… What I’m saying is, it’s not necessarily “business as usual” to be all “Hey, Lady” when you’re QAF.
 
Years ago, on a day that was warm, but not nearly warm enough (so probably in late April or early May), I went out in my leopard-print skirt, my alizarin monster-fur ¾-sleeve jacket, a pair of dangly earrings, and a slick of raspberry lippy. I didn’t know it was Femme Visibility Day until I logged onto twitter that evening. But someone else did, some other femme with pin-up-girl bangs and winged eye-liner, who looked me in the eye like she’d seen something holy, reached out her hand, and said “You. Look. Fabulous!”
She gave me a smile that lit up the street, and I walked home wearing a crown.
 
One single day to throw away all the toxic, internalized shit that insists on telling us that deliberately-feminine-presenting people are always straight, always binary, always either cis women or wanting to be read as such (and I do not mean for safety reasons)… That it’s rude of us to plaster an unverified marginalized identity or two all over someone else’s unconsenting body, like we would be shaming them, just because they look familiar in some way. That it’s better (safer? Less painful? For whom?) for us to assume that the person with the fancy fade and the delicate Monroe piercing, is a “metro-sexual” straight, cis dude, not a brother-fem gay guy or genderqueer and pansexual or a trans dyke rocking Lesbian Haircut Number Two; wiser or kinder (are you kidding me?) to assume that the person with the scuffed, cuffed jeans and the crimson extensions, or the red, red lipstick and the fedora, is a cissexual straight girl not a genderqueer, sexuality-queer trans fem/me, a cis bi-dyke, a trans lesbian.
…That assuming anything else would be met with hostility or confusion or even anxiety, a whole other sort of Unrecognized to the one we’re used to from random androgynous-queers on the street, and all the more painful because of it.
 
The validating Butch-of-a-Certain-Age in that anecdote? The femme who made a point of telling me she could see me? Those encounters are the polar opposite of the queer dances I tend to go to. Queer dances run by femme friends. Queer dances where I at least kinda-sorta know the other regulars. Queer dances where I still walk in with the working assumption that people who don’t know me personally will be wondering what the Straight Lady is doing in their space.
And, to a point, I know that this is basically “Don’t Self-Reject” on a social scale. That I’m assuming every sort-of-stranger there is going to look at me the way my own femme friend looked at the cab-load of 20-something other femmes and assumed they were a bunch of het-cis kiddies crashing the dance during Pride.
The assumption (the fear) that I won’t be seen as “belonging” in a queer context is definitely partly pre-rejection (pre-jection?), but it’s also the end result of every time a more “obvious” (read: masculine) queer doesn’t pick up on my traffic-stopping lipstick & leopard-print skirt, every time the androgynous youngsters at the hippy indie grocery store only turn on the “Oh! You’re one of us!” familiar-smiles when I put money in the Ten Oaks donation box, every time someone I met at That Queer Thing, One Time looks right through me (huge, hard-to-miss me) on the street because I no-longer have Queer Context to flag for me.
It makes me a mix of sad and angry every time.
 
It’s funny / not-funny, strange / not-strange, that I get Recognized by people who I’m reading as older-than-me cis gay men – the ones who sing their sentences in much the same way that I do (so probably some degree of fem, even in the land of No Fats No Femmes Adonis-hungry gay culture) – more often than I get recognized by butch women in my own age bracket. Fellows who stop me on Booth street, in my pencil skirt and plunging neck-line, to say “Honey, do you have a light”, or who stumble, tipsy, up to me in my five-inch heels and mini dress – fresh from the Alt 101 drag show where the only people who gave me the nod, or looked anything like me, were there to perform and in costume – and inform me “Oh, sweetie, they’re gonna love you at CP” only to correct themselves with “Then again, maybe it’s not your scene” when they hear me respond in soprano… because everyone knows that a feminine cis-lady is straight, right?
 

 
This is why I try extra-hard to dazzle-smile at the baby femmes I see on Bank Street, or Somerset, or in the art classes I work for. This is why I try to assume that anyone whose style and bearing a just a little “too much” for where they’re standing – too glamourous, too skin-confident, too aware of their own sensuality – is one of mine, no matter where I find them.
The ones with Nefertiti eyeliner and pink-purple-blue hair extensions.
The ones wearing sun-dresses & stockings in November.
The ones with delicate wrist movements and shy smiles who paint fairy-wings on me in art school.
The ones who dye their armpits to match they eyebrows and scalps.
The ones who name themselves “queen” and “bi-gender” to strangers, but whose body-language says it before they ever open their mouths.
The ones who lounge on the counter, one leg crossed over the other, in deep v-neck t-shirts.
The ones who do the social/emotional labour of keeping up their end of a conversation.
The ones who sidle up to me at parties, because I’m taller than they are, and ask me where I got my shoes.
The ones braving dyke march with long, long hair and flowers in their hatbands.
The ones with boyfriends and big jewelry and hot-pink lipstick who call everybody Darlin’ in the office.
The ones with natural hair and magenta-cerulean plaid back-packs and huge earrings on the bus.
The ones who pluck their eyebrows so carefully and tailor their rock-show tshirts into boat-necks with the sleeves ripped off.
The ones who wear their plaid shirts & blunnies with cut-off short-shorts and scoop-neck tanks.
The ones in skinny jeans and perfect, sparkle-diamond nose-studs.
The ones rocking cocktail party jewelry in their 9am classes.
All of them.
All of us.
I want them to know I see them. That we gleam like fucking rubies, like lights in the dark, to anyone who knows how to look.

Queer Fam… of Origin

A few years ago, when I was an outreach worker for a province-wide Q/T health organization, I got to spend an afternoon with my wife and a bunch of other out-of-town (mostly) adults hanging out in Renfrew County for the local queer youth support/social group’s Big Day Out. THere were safer sex workshops. There was a drag workshop. And there was a dance-party (at which a friend of mine paid the party a surprise visit in her Elvis Gear, thus putting the king in The King, and the kids went nuts and wanted pictures. It was a good time.
BUT (or, more accurately,AND): I met a youngster who needed to talk about Stuff with someone who wasn’t an immediate part of her microscopic dating pool. Long story short: We emailed, she told me about feeling like The Only Queer in the Family, I mentioned some statistical probabilitiess, and she wrote me back to tell me she’d asked her Dad and he’d pointed out the small but significant group of homos amongst her cousins.
“I’m not the only one!” her email crowed.
 
Sometimes it’s a surprise, is what I’m saying.
 
In my case… it wasn’t entirely a surprise.
We were all just really, reeeeeeeeeeeally clueless.
But it still kind of floors me when I’m visiting my (bio) aunt, my (married-in) aunt, my masculine-presenting cousin + her super-femme lady-love[1], and my Big Gay Honourary Uncle… because it’s like: I don’t have to flag! They all KNOW!
It’s like some part of my brain forgets that they’re my relatives, that one of them has known me since I was born, and most of the rest have known me since high-school, and all I see is a house full of hippie-ass creative queers (MAH PEOPLE!) whom I don’t see every day… and I suddenly want to be all “So, my wife and I went to this queer slow-dance thing last weekend…” while re-applying my hot-pink lipstick and talking-with-my-hands so much that my shoulders are getting in on the action.
I feel like those kids in Renfrew, going a little hay-wire just because there are Other Queers Around… even though 90% of who I hang out with, these days, are big ol’ homos.
It’s a bit bizzarre, to tell you the truth.
And yet.
I’m not the only one!
 
 
TTFN,
Ms Syren.
 
 
[1] Who totally gave me the Femme Dazzling Smile when she met me, because we do actually recognize each other, but I wasn’t expecting it, and it was really nice when she did it. 😉

Nuts, Bolts, & Decisions: An Interview on #Writing #Erotica with #ShowYourselfToMe Author Xan West

Hi, folks!
 
So, today, I’m taking part in a blog tour promoting a new erotica anthology – Show Yourself to Me – from author Xan West (You can find the whole tour at this link, yesterday’s stop can be found here, and tomorrows – which involves a time-difference – can be found here. The tour itself includes a number of reviews, but you can also find – and add – reviews at Good Reads and Amazon). I jumped at the chance to read a slew of stories from an author I respect and admire, as well as the opportunity to ask some writerly questions about the nuts, bolts, and decisions involved in writing an anthology like this.
 

Show Yourself To Me – Cover Art
Close-up of a hand, holding a chain-leash, thumb brushing the lips of the person on the other end of the leash.

 
Before we get to the interview, here’s the blurb about the book itself:
 

In Show Yourself to Me: Queer Kink Erotica, Xan West introduces us to pretty boys and nervous boys, vulnerable tops and dominant sadists, good girls and fierce girls and scared little girls, mean Daddies and loving Daddies and Daddies that are terrifying in delicious ways.
 
Submissive queers go to alleys to suck cock, get bent over the bathroom sink by a handsome stranger, choose to face their fears, have their Daddy orchestrate a gang bang in the park, and get their dream gender-play scene—tied to a sling in an accessible dungeon.
 
Dominants find hope and take risks, fall hard and push edges, get fucked and devour the fear and tears that their sadist hearts desire.
 
Within these 24 stories, you will meet queers who build community together, who are careful about how they play with power, who care deeply about consent. You will meet trans and genderqueer folks who are hot for each other, who mentor each other, who do the kind of gender play that is only possible with other trans and genderqueer folks.
 
This is Show Yourself to Me. Get ready for a very wild ride.

 

And now, on with the interview! 😀
 
 
~*~
 
1) Show Yourself to Me opens with a story that, fundamentally, is about belonging. Can you talk to me about that, and why you chose to open your anthology with this piece?
 
“Missing Daddy” sets the mood of the book in so many ways, and belonging is absolutely one of them. For me, as a queer writer who centers my fantasies and desires in my work, belonging is such a central aspect of that, of my queerness, of my kink, of my politic. Being connected, not just in the context of a romantic couple apart from the world, but being in the world, belonging to community and family, belonging to self, as well as being claimed and claiming in the context of D/s. They balance and match each other, all those belongings. Especially for a story that begins by speaking openly about abuse in the context of kink, and the legacy of that in kink life and community, it is so important to center this story of longing and nostalgia in a deep memory of belonging and care in the context of BDSM. This story wants the reader to hold all of that reality in queer kink life: abuse of power and also care with power, legacies of abuse that last long beyond abusive relationships, and legacies of leather that feel whole and beautiful that also come with us, belonging to self, giving self to a partner, belonging in community and family.
 
 
2) Pieces like “My Pretty Boy”, “The Tender, Sweet, Young Thing”, and “How He Likes It” touch on how it can be easier to accept cruelty than gentleness. Can you talk about that for a bit?
 
I’ve had a lifetime of experiencing sensory input in ways that didn’t match how people thought I should be experiencing it, how it was “supposed” to feel. It took me a long time to come to terms with and accept that reality, which has shaped so much of my daily life, especially play and sex. The simple truth is that people are different, and they experience sensations differently. Something that is intolerable for me might be pleasurable or neutral for you. Kink really helped me hold that reality, because although there were cultural expectations about how people would experience sensations, I kept finding, as a top, that the folks I played with would experience them so very differently from each other.
 
This theme in my work, of light touch and gentleness feeling close to or actually intolerable, where sharp, firm or intense touch, and pain in particular, feel welcome and desired, is my attempt to center and validate an experience that is so rarely acknowledged, even in kink life. It is an experience that often resonates for stone-identified folks, and that is definitely part of my motivation as well, to write stories where stone folks can see themselves reflected without judgment or pathologization, as those stories are incredibly rare.
 
It’s also a layered thing, one that gives opportunities for internal struggle within a scene, and pathways for sadism. In “My Pretty Boy,” they consensually play with the fact that Rickie hates gentleness. This created a wonderful way to shift perspective on what cruelty and sadism can look like, and illustrate that sometimes gentleness can be very cruel indeed.
 
 
3) This is a collection of your erotic writing, some of-which is forthcoming (I think… like the excerpt from Shocking Violet), and some of-which has been published elsewhere. A lot of them run to what I think of, accurately or not, as “standard anthology length”, but some are longer and some are much, much shorter (“This Boy”). I’m wondering how many of these pieces were written for specific calls (“Facing the Dark” seems like a likely example), how many just turned up in your head demanding to be written down, how many were born out of personal explorations or writing practice? (Yes, this is essentially a “where do you get your ideas” question).
 
You got it right, close to half of these stories were written for specific calls (including some of the shorter ones, for flash fiction collections). For a number of years, writing to a specific market was part of what drove my writing process. “Facing the Dark” was written because an editor asked me to write something for a gay fireman anthology. “Missing Daddy” was for a bear call, “Ready” for a gay motorcycle collection, “Falling for Essex” for a college boys call, “My Will” for a gay time travel anthology. “Please” was written as an exercise in writing to a tight editorial preference—for Violet Blue’s Best Women’s Erotica series. “The Tale of Jan and Tam” was written for a fairy tale retellings call.
 
When I’m contemplating writing for a call, or am solicited by an editor for a specific kind of story, I sit with it for a while, do some research if needed, see what wants to stick. I often go through a few ideas before I land on one that works for the call and feels doable to me. I’m especially looking for a spark, a beginning, a strong voice, or a moment in the story that I find so compelling I feel like I need to write it. My notebooks are filled with potential ideas like this, and there are some I will bring out years later, and try to write them.
 
The other times, I often find a spark in something else. “The Tender Sweet Young Thing” was sparked by a conversation I had at a regular queer gathering I go to. “Compersion” was sparked partly by a class I went to on the subject, that felt like it completely left out so much of my own experiences of compersion. “Nervous Boy” was written in response to a craigslist ad I saw, and answered, though I never got a response. I’ve also written fantasies and dreams that kept returning demanding to be told. I’ve written pieces for lovers, and potential lovers. I’ve written stories in response to scenes I’ve watched.
 
Often, it’s a mesh of things that drive my writing; the spark or the voice or the lines that come into my mind are just the beginning. There are often experiences and ideas I want to capture, and things I want to talk about in my stories. I’m fairly unabashed about having certain agendas in my work.
 
 
4) I know you make a point of showcase a lot of different bodies in your erotica – your characters don’t default to “able-bodied and thin”, for example, and you make sure your readers know it. With that in mind, when a character ends up being white or fat, fem/me or cis or disabled (or whatever cluster of identities a given character may have), how much of those intersecting privileges and oppressions are just “how the character showed up in my head” versus how much of it is an active decision on your part as an author about the kind of story you want to tell?
 
Much of the time, not defaulting takes conscious work. Sometimes I catch myself not having defined some aspects of a character’s identity and there I am, stuck in my usual defaults. I usually am stuck by the things I haven’t defined, a little ways in, not knowing where to go. Conscious work gets me unstuck, and a lot of the time that is at least partly about establishing specificities of identity.
 
Some aspects of a character’s identity will come to me with the character’s voice or the situation or the conflict I’m imagining at the beginning of the process. Sometimes those choices are driven by the way I puzzle out what I can bring to a specific call, how I can imagine bringing these people together.
 
One of the things that has become very clear to me is how much the specificities of identity of my characters are often shaped by my own identities and needs. When I think about the specifics of the queer genders that appear in this collection, it is clear that I’ve mostly been writing stories about my own gender experiences, or about genders that I have fantasized about being. Over the past 15 years of writing erotica, the body of work from which I drew the stories for this collection does not include the diversity of genders of the people in my life and my communities. Instead, my deep hunger for putting myself into a genre where I have mostly been erased or misrepresented has driven many of my choices about the genders of my characters. As a whole collection, those choices contribute to a deep erasure that mirrors the ways trans misogyny and misogyny often operate in queer communities. For me, this recognition is even more reason to work more on consciously considering the identities of my characters.
 
When I was pulling stories together for the collection, from the body of my existing work, one of the things I worked on was more clearly marking the identities of the characters, so that they weren’t just clear to me, but were clear to the reader. So the reader also was less likely to go to defaults while reading. I needed to do this much more with my earlier work than with my later work.
 
A few years ago I began a project of deliberately centering disabled characters in my work, one that coincided with my decision to live more deeply into my own disabilities. I wanted my creative work to hold the same intentions as my personal work, so they could feed each other. I have found writing these stories to be so powerful in my own life. Many of them are included in this collection; they are the ones written in the third person.
 
 
5) On a related note, you tell stories from a lot of different perspectives – both from story to story and sometimes within a single piece. Can you talk about the factors that determine whose PoV you’re writing from, which stories are going to involve “head hopping” versus which ones stay with a single narrator? I’m thinking, in particular, of stories like “My Precious Whore” where you’re dealing with some fairly heavy edges (for the characters but also for, um, me as a reader…) but also of “The Tender, Sweet, Young Thing” where the narration is bouncing between half a dozen heads. Can you talk a little bit about that?
 
Most of my early work was in the first person, though I played with that some by having POV characters sometimes imagine that they knew the perspective of other people (like in “Nervous Boy”). My recent work has been in third person. It was a conscious choice to shift that way, because I found it unblocked me. Until I tried third person, I kept hitting up against a wall, couldn’t figure out how to more clearly mark characters as disabled.
 
When I chose to shift my work, I embraced head hopping, something that is often frowned upon in erotica circles. I wanted to explore multiple interior experiences, see where that got me. In “The Tender Sweet Young Thing”, I wanted to stick with three perspectives—to stay inside the heads of the three queers that were central to plotting the fantasy scene, because they each were deeply invested in creating this scene from a different place. Dax, from a fantasy ze had held since childhood, Mikey partly as a gift of love and recognition for Dax, and partly for her own self, and Téo, who recognized a gender he wanted to play with. The story shifts from one to the other as the dynamics shift between the characters, that’s how it flowed out, so by the time you get to the actual scene, you hopefully have a stake in each of them getting what they need from it, and from each other.
 
With first person, often a voice comes to me as a story sparks. Point of view is one of the first things that solidifies in the story. In “My Precious Whore”, I was working on a few things in that story:
1. I was working to illuminate the edges inherent in playing with misogyny and whorephobia, to take the reader deep enough to really be able to see how deeply dangerous this kind of play is.
2. I was trying to illustrate how a structure of D/s and consciously chosen power play can create a container for this sort of intense and risky psychological edge play, make it possible to do it.
3. I wanted to capture something specific about orgasm control, how it can work in humiliation play scenes, how helplessness from forced orgasms can be particularly intense and beautiful.
4. I wanted to write a story that explored possessive top desire that wasn’t feral (which I’d mostly been writing), but went to colder places, wielded power differently, grappled with the edges of misogyny and deep psychological play.
5. I was attempting to illuminate the ways being the top in a scene centered on humiliation, objectification, and play with oppression can be incredibly edgy for the top and how the top can need support from the bottom.
 
Some of those things would be a good match for the bottom’s point of view, especially #3. (I want to write another story from a bottom’s point of view that can get me there more deeply.) #1 and #2 could work from either point of view. But for #4 and #5 I needed the top’s perspective to get me there.
 
I put that story in a drawer for a while after I wrote it. It felt too volatile to put out into the world, and too personally edgy. That’s how it has often worked for me with the stories that go deep into play with misogyny. (“Strong” is another example.) I was concerned about the damage they might do in the world, and worried about the ways they could be misinterpreted. This version of “My Precious Whore” illuminates top vulnerability much more than earlier versions, and it showcases the support of the bottom. Telling it from the top’s perspective really helps it get there, helps the reader touch those things.
 
 
6) In “The Ballad of Tam and Jan” (and I love that Carter Hall turns up in more than one story, by the way), you talk about transformative experiences for tops. In it, and also stories like “My Pretty Boy”, you talk about tops needing to remember and honour their own needs. There’s this pervasive (or maybe it’s just me?) thing where sadistic, and even just toppy, desires are framed as not okay – like it’s totally fine to want to be anonymously skull-fucked by a truck-load of random people, but wanting to turn someone into “just a hole” (to pick a theme that ran through a lot of your stories), to dehumanize them, is less okay. Wanting to beat someone to a pulp because it feels good to hit defenseless people is, well, monstrous. I find in a lot of Kink 101 stuff, the top is framed as facilitating the bottom’s experience, with the bottom being “really in charge” and the top being a provider in a lot of ways. Can you talk about that stuff in the context of the needs and vulnerabilities of tops?
 
The fear of top desires and needs that you describe is one of the most frustrating aspects of kink culture for me. I’ve written several essays about it. It’s a big problem, and can make navigating play so much harder for everyone, so much less likely to be mutual. This image of the top as facilitating the bottom’s experience and having no needs of their own is a huge contributing factor to ableism in kink communities. It’s been a challenge for me, personally, to find play partners that are up for considering and honoring my needs as a top, especially my needs for support around pushing my own edges.
 
My work, and in particular the stories in this book, are invested in creating different images of tops, different narratives about what tops need and desire, what bottoms do to support tops, what play that is mutual and honors the needs and desires of all parties can be like. Stories help create culture, and this book is one of the ways I’m trying to shift the way we think about top desires, top needs, and top vulnerabilities.
 
These stories openly celebrate sadistic and dominant desire, and that aspect of them alone is likely to make people uncomfortable. I’ve had stories rejected (with rather intense judgmental language) for openly describing sadistic desire. Once I had an editor suggest that I edit the story so that the dominant was not so clearly getting off on making the submissive cry during sex, because that felt inherently non-consensual. The editor suggested that I change the story so that the dominant was doing it to facilitate the experience the submissive needed.
 
In these stories, I am attempting to carve out room for the beauty and heat of unapologetically sadistic desire, and it is partly to meet my own needs. I need a kink culture that honors sadists who have their own desires, that supports tops to be vulnerable, that asks bottoms to support tops in play, that honors that everyone has needs. Not just because I’m human, but particularly as a disabled top.
 
 
7) Tell me something you love about this collection and want everybody to know.
 
I’ve talked about writing stories that center disabled and sick characters, how that was my project over the last few years. These stories often include disabled and chronically ill fat trans and genderqueer characters playing with each other, in community with each other, creating accessible spaces together. I’ve never read stories like that before, which is one of the reasons I needed to write them.
 
What I haven’t talked about is how impossible it has been to place these stories in anthologies. I’ve been aching to share these stories with the world, but have had no luck getting them published. I finally decided that I had to try to sell them as a group with my other work, in a collection like this, in order to get them printed.
 
Before I could seriously tackle that project, Go Deeper Press approached me to request a manuscript. They love these stories in particular, which makes me incredibly glad. And now these stories are out in the world, and I am so thrilled that people get to read them! I love that my first collection shows some of my oldest work, next to the new directions I’ve been going in as a writer.
 
 
Thank you, Xan. 🙂
 
 
~*~
 
 
You can pick up a copy of Show Yourself to Me from Go Deeper Press (print or digital), or as a e-book from Amazon.
 
You can find Xan’s thoughts about the praxis of sex, kink, queerness, power, and writing at xanwest.wordpress.com.

There’s A Place for Us – On Integration and Identity

So there’s this JAKEtalk (like a TEDtalk, but really gay) and I haven’t listened to it all the way through, because he opened his talk with a quotation about Gay Assimilation into the Het world, and then spoke briefly about the Queer Bubble, about increasing (ish?) acceptance of The Gay[1] in mainstream[2] society, and what that means, or could mean, when it comes to maintaining a Queer Identity when that identity is no-longer based on, or reliant upon, being The Other or being an Outsider.
 
Which seems very strange to me, at first blush, so I thought I’d ramble a bit and see if I can parse it out. (The JAKEtalk intro is being used as a jumping-off-point here, rather than this post being an actual response to anything in the JAKEtalk).
Onwards!
 
So, look. I’m a weirdo. I spent my teens and early 20s wearing All The Velvet and All The Eyeliner because (a) PRETTY!, but also because (b) I figured out fairly early on that, at 6’4”, there is no protective colouration that will make e look “normal”, so I might as well (i) wear what I actually like, and/or (ii) give them something to fucking stare at.
So I’m fairly well-versed in Identity As Defined By Otherness, even if it’s on the relatively shallow level of being an unusually shaped/sized cis chick. I’m pagan – in the “Bioregional Animism” and “Ancestor Veneration” senses of the word, rather than the more widely recognized “Wiccan Offshoots” sense of the word (thank you gods, for a country where we have “Freedom TO”-based freedom of religion), and I’m a poly, kinky bi-dyke femme. A lot of my personal identities/labels/shorthands-for-what-I-am are frequently explained by highlighting the ways that they contrast with more mainstream/normative/normalized identities.
BUT that doesn’t mean that my identities can’t exist without that opposition.
Being married to my wife doesn’t make me Not Queer. Or “not queer enough” for that matter.
One of my poly-leather family members once said (gods, lifetimes ago now, back when my wife and I hadn’t even been dating for six months yet) that being a “married queer” didn’t change the way that she built family, that she didn’t stop being poly (or kinky, or anti-o, or a TIFD) just because she was also a Nice Jewish Girl with a ring on her left finger.
This has stuck with me for years now.
 
I love my Bubble. My kinky, poly, trans-inclusive dyke bubble is awesome. But, specifically because it’s so awesome, I kind of wish 100% of humanity was in here with me. Not in here diluting the awesomeness with their hetcis-normative expectations, with their “stay out of my bathroom” and their “I don’t understand how that kind of relationship could be anything but abusive”, their “porn is the theory” and their “multiple concurrent relationships are a sign of emotional immaturity[3]”, their “you’re in love with your own oppression” and their “you just haven’t found the right man yet”… No. I mean I want 100% of humanity in here with our norms and ideals and social expectations[4] which, largely, boil down to “Your kink[5] is okay, whether or not it’s mine” and that the more options we have, and can put words around, the better.
 
I don’t think that we stop having our identities just because more people accept, normalize, and celebrate them.
 
My wife is not “less poly” just because her mother is happy to meet her many partners, and to have us in attendance for her 65th birthday. I’m not “less queer” just because my own gay auntie paved the way for me in our family, or because her parents responded with absolute love (I know, because she read the letter from them, responding to her coming-out letter, at my wedding) when she came out decades ago. My friends are not “less trans” because zir mom took zir shopping for more gender-appropriate clothing, or because her nieces call her their favourite auntie; and they’re not “less kinky” because they can talk about their desires and relationships with their vanilla friends.
We do not stop being what we are just because the Normal People still love us, or let us on the PTA, or look to us as part of our faith community. Being unwanted is not a prerequisite for being us.
 
It’s sucks beyond all possible measure that any of my poly friends have to keep coming out to their families-of-origin, have to worry about how said relatives are going to handle it when they bring their multiple people home for the holidays. It sucks beyond all possible measure that my family members have fam-of-o or (extended-community-members, for that matter – get with the program, y’all…) who keep getting their pronouns wrong even though it’s been YEARS since they came out. It sucks beyond all possible measure that any of my dyke Fam has to deal with out and out hatred as part of “being a good daughter”.
I know that we face this stuff, that our bubble is (our bubbles are) how we protect each other, hold each other up, keep each other safe, help each other heal. And I don’t want to lose the love that comes with building our own families in spite of the Charmed Circle wishing that we weren’t around being our fabulous, unapologetic selves “at” them. But we don’t have to lose it.
We don’t have to stop being big-hearted and open-hearted with each other just because we’re gaining the chance to be open-hearted with the people we came from, too.
 
 
TTFN,
Ms. Syren.
 
 
[1] Less-so The Trans, so let’s keep pushing for that one, shall we?
 
[2] Meaning heteronormative, cisnormative.
 
[3] TRY IT SOME TIME, I DARE YOU, KIDDO.
 
[4] Which, full disclosure: I ain’t perfect yet. None of us are. But I know where I’m going.
 
[5] Gender / family-structure / body / employment situation / sexual identity / etc – Choose your own adventure(s).

Day Of Pink? Nope. Some Follow-Up Thoughts to a Tweet

So someone on Twitter asked who-all was going to attend this evening’s Day Of Pink Gala (hosted by the CCGSD, formerly Jer’s Vision), and I responded, this morning, with one word: Nope.
While the sentiment was definitely clear, I did feel like I was being a bit misleading. So, as is my wont, I wrote a blog post to talk about this a little bit more.
 
Look. The truth of the matter is that I’ve never gone to a Day of Pink Gala. Even though it’s a free (iirc) party, and even though there’s a good chance that there’s free food at said free party, and even though I am exactly the kind of broke artist who will show up at a stranger’s vernisage specifically to eat the free cheese while trying to get a modeling job… I never went to DoP. For Reasons. Put it down to my being a home-body and big crowds making me nervous.
 
In previous years, this wasn’t anything to Make A Statement about, so I never did. At most, I’d shrug and go “Meh. I think I’ve got something else on that night” and not mention that “something else” was probably “youtube videos”. But then this happened: The CCGSD appointed Laureen Harper as their Day Of Pink ambassador. Now, on her own, Laureen Harper is just… some chick. Google her, and pretty-much all you’ll find is her connection to her husband, the current leader of the governing party of Canada.
You know, the biggest bully in the country.
(Okay, he might be tied with Don Plett, but every slime-ball needs a wingman, amirite?)
 
So here’s the thing. It is (technically) possible to have a lasting, loving relationship with a partner whose politics differ radically from your own. At least in theory[1]. So this would be a completely different situation if Laureen Harper’s youth-advocacy work involved being vocally and publically supportive of the rights of specifically queer and trans students to a harassment-free learning environment.
But, as far as I can tell, she’s not doing that. Sure, she talks about how it’s important to support diversity in schools, but in Ottawa, and in Ontario more generally, we’ve been watching state-sponsored English-language Catholic schools insist on the term “diversity” as a way to specifically refuse to support, or even recognize, their queer and trans students. “Diversity” in and of itself is great – the Pagans have a saying, “Strength in Diversity”, that references how much healthier a tall-grass prairie is to a monocrop, for example, how many voices singing in harmony with each other are way more powerful, more moving, than one voice shouting all alone – but “diversity” isn’t great when it’s co-opted by people who are actively trying to force you back into a closet.
 
Also, something worth noting: Pink Shirt Day was originally a campaign started by two rural Nova Scotia 12th-graders in support of a ninth-grade student who was hit with specifically homophobic slurs when he wore a pink shirt to school one day. Day Of Pink is a national upshot of youth-for-youth solidarity and, importantly, of youth standing with peers who face violence specifically because their gender presentation and/or sexual orientation is, or is perceived to be, outside of what’s considered “normal”.
So here’s a story from my own childhood:
I didn’t know “bisexual” was a thing until I was sixteen, and it took another year for me to figure out that “bixsexual” was a term that applied to me. But I didn’t need to be “out and proud” or even just “visibly queer” (as a cis, femme, little girl, the only things that marked me as “other” were my height, my music, and – unexpectedly? – my insistence on wearing dresses) to face homophobic bullying. Nobody beat me up, but my fifth grade was all about getting swarmed by mobs of classmates jeering “Are you a lesbian? Are you a lesbian???” (if you were wondering about where that fear of crowds came from…), stealing my shoes, being told that people being “different” was fine just “Not when they’re different like you”. It was my teachers being deeply unsettled to see me doing a Fred and Ginger dance routine with another girl in my grade.
I know damn well that I was not the only turned-out-to-be-queer kid in my class. Not just statistically, either (Ottawa’s a small town, for a place with a million people). Given that none of our teachers were saying “there’s nothing wrong with this, stop being a douche-canoe”, I can’t say I blame them for letting me draw the fire, if they’d even figured themselves out yet, which isn’t necessarily the case. But if they knew? If nine and ten year old kids knew they were One Of Us, and knew that to keep themselves safe they had to laugh at the (other) faggot right along with the Normal People… do you really think they wouldn’t?
I’m not typically one to quote Ivan Coyote, but they said something on facebook a while back, after having seen a high school teacher wearing a pink t-shirt that read “The Pink Shirt Says It All”. What they said on facebook was (I’m paraphrasing, I think) “The pink shirt means fuck-all if it’s not backed up with action”.
 
Look. There are things that CCGSD does that I really, really like. I love that they hold national conferences where high school students can learn how to advocate for themselves and their peers with a specific focus on gender and/or sexuality minorities and youth of colour. I love that they run Rainbow Write, locally, which is a program that bring queer and/or trans writers and, frequently, specifically queer and/or trans writers of colour, to Ottawa to do writing workshops with queer and trans teens[2] (and, if space allows, Rainbow Brights of all ages). But Day Of Pink is supposed to be about stopping specifically homophobic and transphobic bullying; about making schools and, more broadly, the world safer for our children; for sending the message (and backing it up with action, folks!) that this particular type of cruelty – which is used to police gender and sexuality at every age and regardless of what a given targeted-person’s gender and sexual orientation actually are, but which always, always hurts OUR kids, no matter whom its directed at – is absolutely not okay. Deciding that the appropriate ambassador for this message is someone who will actively dilute it, who is someone with deep and personal ties to a party that is clearly dead set against all of us who live outside of that tiny, narrow charmed circle? My dears, that was the wrong decision.
 
Those feelings of rage and betrayal that are flying all over twitter right now? Those feelings are real. Some of us believed you had our backs. But getting popular with the powerful crowd by betraying those who are already getting stomped on?
Honey… that’s what bullies do.
 
 
Ms Syren.
 
 
[1] Although, I’ll be honest, I’m not sure how. That is a hell of a hard road to walk, even when your partner’s hateful, fear-mongering politics aren’t routinely being rammed into actual federal laws.
 
[2] The second time I came out – as kinky and poly and queer-femme – as an adult with my own place to live, it was queer (and frequently kinky and poly) femme poets who got me through my divorce, helped me see my reflection on paper, and helped me find my voice as a writer. I can’t imagine how much more of a huge fucking relief it would be for a queer and/or trans kid, a teenager who might be afraid of getting kicked out of their home if they’re open about who they are, to meet and be mentored by adults who are just like them and who get it.

The Queen of Cups & The Great Devourer – On Femme Appetite, Desire & Vulnerability.

The idea of Stone, the idea of Femme. I’ve heard descriptions of “stone femme” wherein the femme in question is The Queen of Cups – receptive, reactive, responsive, the partner whose moan, shiver, arch, pushes the energy back, completes the emotional/energetic/erotic loop so that it can cycle through again. In this context (in any context?) Femme Bottom (any bottom?) is all appetite.
But so am I.
I read Xan West’s writing about Stone, about the gaze, about desire and how a partner’s responses can make them come, just with breath, with sound, with need. And this is so familiar to me.
I’m not stone. My clothes can come off when I fuck, am maybe at my most powerful, most “toppy”, when I’m in nothing by sweat-slicked skin and high heeled shoes; I crave touch, hunger for it, too, but it’s scary as fuck and hard to stay in my body to accept it, let alone welcome it, without overthinking everything or flinching/freezing pre-emptively. I’m seven years (twenty years? thirty?) into trying to navigate my way through this minefield of fear, body, and performativity, towards the pleasure, openness, sincerity, the offering that I want to give in vulnerability, in desire, but also towards my own ability to accept the offering I want to receive, crave receiving, as a dominant bottom.
I’m femme.
When Tara Hardy writes “I, too, have a mouth”, about wanting to taste the world; when Leah Lakshmi Piepzna Samarasinha writes about femme hunger and needing to be cautious when it comes to sharing the gulf of that ravenous need… That’s me.
As a femme top, as someone who is all appetite, who is all mouth, I am not the Queen of Cups. Following you with hungry eyes, I want you to see, and respond to, my desire. At my purest, I am the Great Devourer: I want to eat you alive. I want you to like it. To offer yourself up to my hunger, to the tongue that would taste every quivering, shuddering inch of you.
Xan writes, in “Where Pleasure Resides” (same link as above), a lot about cocks. I don’t have one of those. It’s not a word that fits me. But I deeply understand the yearning to get energetically inside someone, to find her mouth of fire, coax it open with the red, red pulse of my tongue – physical, energetic, or both – until I am so deep inside that I can lap at her heart and coax that open, too.
This is what I want.
This is also what I dread.
I don’t know how much of it is conditioning – my mother telling me, in my teens, that once you’ve fucked someone your heart goes with them, too – versus how much of this is true to the actual connection between touch and trust, between sexual vulnerability and emotional vulnerability, that exists in my body. But, yes, if I let someone fuck me, get inside me, even just feed me – though it’s easier to avoid when I’m topping (“less direct” is the wrong way to say it, but… riding a response is not the same as generating that response, and there’s an emotional buffer in that difference) – the chances that I’ll fall in love with them, want a deep, lasting emotional connection with them, rise dramatically. And that’s scary. Terrifying. And also yearned for.
I’m hungry and afraid to eat.
What a damn silly place to be.
 
 
TTFN,
Ms Syren.

B is for Beef Bougineon (and Building Phamily) – Greater Granola Blog Project 2014

Okay, maybe this is a really bizarre title for a GGBP post, but work with me here. The other night (more than a week ago, now), I went to a dinner that included a number of people in what I think of as my extended poly family. I made the dessert.
 
It’s funny.
 
Maybe in a more conventially-structured family, I’d look at this kind of an evening as “getting together with friends”. But some of those friends are my wife’s other partners, which makes them more than friends. Some of them are related by leather ties rather than ties of “blood or alliance” (as we like to say in Anthropology Kinship Diagrams). Some are both.
 
In these small, fringe communities (the queers, the perverts) we are fairly used to (re-)building family from scratch, and – because our communities tend to be small – we frequently wind up being “exes in law” or whatever with just about everybody we know. Throw polyamoury and the amicable disolution/redefinition of power dynamics (like when someone goes from being So-and-So’s owner to being hir mentor, for example) into the mix, and you wind up with these intersecting familial-relationships that can make a community look like the cosmic web.
 
And the thing is, this isn’t all that unusual. Any small community – think tiny farming towns, for example – winds up with most families linked to most other families through marriage or cousins or what-have-you. It’s just that, when those interconnections are based around The Fucking (kinky stuff, power-exchanges, sex parties, multiple sweeties… you know, all those things that an up-bringing in Patriarchy doesn’t really prepare you for) rather than around weddings and grandkids[1], it’s like we forget that there was ever a map at all.
 
But it’s there.
 
I have a friend who loves Miss Manners and Emily Post. She loves etiquette books because they basically boil down to answering the question “What do I say if my son brings his gay trans leather-daddy home for the holidays” with “You say: It’s a pleasure to meet you”.
 
We don’t have to come up with a script from scratch. We just have to addapt what’s already there.
 
 
TTFN,
Ms Syren.
 
 
[1] Although those could argueably be grouped under The Fucking as well…