Category: LoveLetters

[An abbreviated version of this essay is available in print in Bend Over Magazine Issue Summer/Fall 2011 http://bendovermagazine.com/]

I really thought I had IT figured out by the time I reached 25: polyamorous, whee!; queer, whee!; feminist, whee!: Liberation. I’d even found a partner around that time who was clearly a life partner, excited to live in open relationship with me. Smooth sailing. And suddenly, 32, I find myself smack in the middle of process. Still discovering. Nothing exactly figured out. And what’s more, fresh with entirely new ideas about how partnership might be conceived.

When I first entered an open relationship with my partner, even the smallest steps were hard, so we took it slow. Even when we expressed attraction to other people, it scared and confused us. When we kissed other people, we sometimes had to swallow feelings of jealousy, in part knowing that if we were in the same position, we would have done the same thing and to express too much jealousy might put our own freedoms at jeopardy. We also experienced mixed emotions, like being turned on by a lover’s lover, but scared to see it followed through. We both knew we were working towards a much larger sense of freedom, with each other and with ourselves.

I have to say that for me the best cure for jealousy has been practice. Practice over time makes me conceive of my relationship as open and no other way; neither of us can imagine being monogamous anymore. I also like to imagine my partner with another person and to experience seeing him have sex with another person so that I can deflate whatever imagined drama I have attached to the action. What’s more, I’ve found that it turns me on. My partner was with me the first time I had sex with another person within our relationship and vise versa.

In the beginning, I was really focused sexually on the newness of my partner, and I was afraid that anything I did outside of a monogamous relationship would put our relationship at risk, even though we’d vocalized that we were both “polyamorous.” I was fearful of losing what we were beginning to create by actually exercising my freedom. Yet I suspected that one day I would want to be able to explore this polyamorous identity I had come into the relationship proclaiming, so in the beginning we had to push even at our own boundaries.

Deciding our relationship was open meant not just the ability to have sex with other people but trying to think about the ways that sex and love can exist in various structures across various types of relationships. I wondered: how could this thought alone change my perspective on my relationships with other people and with myself?

In a monogamous relationship we don’t close ourselves off to the idea of having any intimacy with people outside our “primary,” we just close ourselves off to having a sexual intimacy with someone outside our “primary,” and sometimes this inevitable affects other types of intimacies. The emphasis of “faithfulness” generally lies almost entirely upon these boundaries, hinges upon this idea of sexual intimacy, and sometimes those bounds are difficult to define (specific types of touching, kissing, attraction at all, intention). But there are so many other intimacies to experience with each other, some of which for me feel a lot more intimate than actually having sex.

Deciding that sexual intimacy could be part of other relationships opened me to the idea of many different types of intimacies existing, in various combination, with other people. Important for me to learn—and continue to learn—is that if other relationships do offer the possibility of various intimacies, than perhaps not all intimacies should be expected from my partner. In other words, my partner needn’t be my sexual partner, roommate, housemate, best friend, confidant, movie partner, intellectual sparer, musical inspiration, artistic collaborator. Yet the sadness I would experience from a false expectation that he could be or should be is what a friend recently called a “ghost of conventionality.” And those ghosts are sometimes a struggle. But letting go of unfair expectations helps me gain the independence and self-sufficiency necessary to sustain a long-term relationship.

Some of my explorations with polyamory began with things unrelated to sex. Dancing was something I always enjoyed with other people, exploring how my body and movement reacted in combination with different people. Also, as a performer I have always been attracted to backstage culture, where inhibitions about privacy vanish. This is the kind of body intimacy that I love about the after part of sex. If this is allowed, why can’t sex be allowed, too? I knew that my partner would have to be someone who could understand and love these things about me. Even sharing one piece of writing with many people gave me insight into the ways that various readers interpret the same words and our relationship as such—amorous, erotic, sexual.

Yet sex is often the thing that invokes jealousy, sometimes to the breaking point in our relationships. When we first got together, my partner and I had this unspoken “rule”, that outside of our own, every other sexual relationship would be vacant of emotional attachment. How quickly we figured out we don’t function like that. Most often I would rather form an emotional bond with the people I have sex with. Even if we don’t have sex that often or even if we only have sex once, there’s nothing to prevent me from wanting to have longevity in our relationship with each other.

What’s more, how quickly I figured out that non-sexual intimacies often caused me personally way more jealousy than sex did. My partner’s artistic collaborations with other people can be just as jealousy-inducing as sex … and a two hour long discussion with someone that I can really spar with gets me just as hot as an orgasm.

Jealousy is one thing, but what are “we” afraid of? The biggest fear is that our partner, whom we love and trust, will fall in love with someone else. Right?

Not so sure. I started to think about how the “in love” definition is pretty varied. And to some degree, I feel like I’ve experienced those feelings of “in love” outside of my partnership; feelings of initial infatuation that lead me to wanting to learn everything about my beloved, like suddenly taking Thai cooking classes or learning to sail. Just because a person is not my primary does not mean that I don’t experience sadness at breakups, either. I suppose because when all possibilities are wide open, the idea that anything should strictly “end” is difficult for me.

Nevertheless, “Falling in love” is not “falling in partnership.” In fact, when I chose my partner it wasn’t just because I was in love with him, and not because of our sexual compatibility, but because I could visualize him as part of my family.

So what’s the even deeper fear? We fear that our partner will stop being our confidant or she’ll stop desiring us sexually. But neither of these things mean, necessarily, that the partnership is over, it might just have grown into a new agreement, or perhaps one person is, for some time, unable to provide every intimacy we wish for.

A friend recently suggested something that really blew my mind. I had always conceived of one “primary” partnership and many lovers. But this friend opened me up to the idea of many life partners, not all of whom, if any, provide us with sex. In other words, she took sex not out of the equation but placed it alongside all of our other needs equally.

Basically with each life partner we have the opportunity to form agreements and dreams about how our lives will be shared—as sexual partner or partners, as co-parent or co-parents, as housemate or housemate(s), etcetera. Some of these intersections can happen, but not all of them have to happen within one person.

I had a commitment ceremony with my one life partner, but what about the other people that have traveled with me and will continue to travel with me throughout the rest of my life? Should I, could I, also have a kind of commitment ceremony of my life with theirs? The possibility is exciting and the re-imagining opens me again.

It opens me in part to the idea that I can’t categorize my love for other people hierarchically; I can’t say one kind of love is more fulfilling, I can only describe my love specific to a person. Loving a person, lover or partner or friend, will always be exactly what loving that person is like and can be like no other. There is no one who uniquely replaces the role my partner shares in my life. Even if I were to accept more than one life partner in my life, they’d still never be alike.

How will this new imagination continue to guide me in this long process of learning?
–I’m open to finding out.

Seems that any time is as good as any to discuss these questions about why we do what we do. And as the interviews from performers in the Too Much Pussy: Feminist Sluts in the Queer X Show are being published and the film itself shown widely, I should always be discussing my own feelings on the matters at hand instead of keeping them in my head.

There is nothing inherently empowering about making porn or showing the naked female body onstage. The empowered part comes much earlier through the freedom to explore what we actually are interested in (our life questions) and love to do. This could include, but is not limited to, for example, knowing that we are exhibitionists or artists and, perhaps, or, that we enjoying exploring sex with lots of different kinds of people. The freedom to explore these things without being pressured because of the assumed speculation about our gender or sexual orientation or what we are publicly “allowed” to do or express out loud as a result of those genders and orientations deflates the imagined magnitude of what it is to show our sexual bodies in public.

If we are to speak of empowerment anyway—and honestly I’ve always hated the word; it reminds me of a top down approach to teaching, in fact I examined it in my undergraduate senior thesis with rural women’s farming cooperatives in Nicaragua—I suggest we think of empowerment as personal, relative and as process. Who is anyone to speak of what is or is not empowering to any given woman or person? Which academic or researcher knows what exactly it means to be empowered when truly, speaking for myself, I am never fully empowered; it is an endless path that has no end. Empowerment must be a constant process that I (and only I) can understand for myself.

At some moment “empowerment” could be, simply, the ability to go to a movie alone.

Incidentally I am reminded every year at the porn film festival how many levels of stigma we have to pass going to a movie alone (stigma), watching porn at all (stigma), watching porn as a ____ gendered person (stigma), watching in a theatre or other public place (stigma). Overcoming any of these stigma could be points of personal empowerment.

In the next moment empowerment could be the ability to decide what kind of porn to watch and getting a rental store card and renting it on my own. In the next it could be making and staring in my own porn. But for many women empowerment has nothing at all to do with porn or sex or movies at all; and so be it for her.

The making of porn does not empower me; at best it might actualize some process of empowerment that I’ve currently arrived at in my personal life questioning process. I like to think that as humans we are all guided by life questions that make us curious as children and travel with us, in and out of focus, along the road into adulthood and old age. My personal questions have to do with sex and gender, and so be it for me.

Thinking from this standpoint, a healthy vision of empowerment could be … having the freedom to pursue the-in depth answering of those life questions (freedom from social stigmas, economic freedom, educational freedom, freedom of movement and mental and spiritual freedom). In this sense that life process of empowerment could include any activity at all; it could be taking a walk in the woods or going out at night or having a child or shaving our heads. Shaving my head came from an empowered place, was an actualization of my empowerment and further empowered me. Learning to ride my bike was empowering; later, riding was no longer “empowering,” for me, it was building my own bike with the help of a friend, then, learning to repair it. For another woman, she feels empowered by owning and driving her own car. In my life, driving a car is a choice I would not make but I support and understand her empowerment in this act.

CNN (whose commentators probably all own cars) tells me that women in rural Central America (who generally do not own cars) are empowered to use solar powered cooking stoves instead of wood burning stoves. It’s certainly a better choice for the environment and notable that these women are “empowered” to make personal changes for the environment when they individually already make such a low environmental footprint in comparison to huge corporations (a topic for another time) , but do the women feel this is empowering for themselves? Why not ask them?!? Perhaps one of these women would like to exercise her questions about her own queer sexuality instead of learning to use a different kind of stove.

In reality there are so many social taboos, so many warnings about how we should live in fear, follow rules according to fear, that we have many arenas through which to express our personal empowerment. I am not saying that a rural campesina should watch or star in queer porn to be empowered, but for goodness sake, if it makes her more happy or fulfilled to do so than learning to cook on a solar powered stove, I am in full support. The reality is, she probably has no exposure to queer communities or resources to outreach to them. The people reading this at least have the economic freedom, the access to resources, the social freedoms, to decide at all

All and any seem equally valuable to me.

I am certainly not arguing that an empowered woman has to make porn or be a publicly sexual creature or enjoy queer sex. Within some privileged circles it’s been framed as fashionable to buy sex toys and learn how to use them, with the insinuation that a woman who doesn’t isn’t empowered. But for some this is empowerment and that is also valid.

All of these choices are equally valid: to pursue zoology over mathematics; to wear or not wear any given piece of clothing, revealing or concealing; to work as a shop keeper instead of a gas station attendant. One women´s sense of personal empowerment could be to take it off, for another it could be to put it on. Certainly the exploration, metamorphosis, any change at all, any exploration in our lives, the idea that we are allowed to explore at all, should be welcomed by all, but certainly by those that think of themselves as queer, as feminist, as radical.

As it relates to my own life’s questions, the idea that I, or any artist, could possibly avoid exposing the body if we are dealing with themes of a human nature (which seem at some point to stem back to critical questions about the physical human body, it’s basic functions such as birth … breathing … sleeping … dreaming … eating … having sex … giving birth … making partnerships … dying) makes little sense to me. Doesn’t it seem more unnatural to avoid the exposure of the body, especially to do so out of some kind of fear of social critique? Or to do so in order to avoid the obvious and clichéd critique that exposing the body is tantamount to being a sex object? Is it not also somehow unfair that the female body or transgendered or queer body would garner this critique over and beyond that received by the male body?

Moreover that if we as artists do knowingly deal with the physical body and expose some part if it—the elbow perhaps—why privilege some other part when in actuality our themes deal with the body as a whole?

Thanks for the response to the film Too Much Pussy: Feminist Sluts in the Queer X Show. As a performer in the tour I welcome responses to the film. The following is a personal response and does not necessarily represent the opinions of the group as a whole. Conversation can also happen outside of this forum if you want to email me directly: madkate27@gmail.com

I wanted to take the time to respond to some of the concerns that were raised because this is a public forum and one statement in particular is an unfounded accusation that should not be circulated.

Specifically, no person on the Queer X Tour had or has a drinking problem and I think that the commentator should be careful about making such accusations in a public forum.

It is true that the clip about drinking (which was meant to be a joke) could have been omitted from the film, if only to avoid assumptions like “performers have to be drunk in order to perform” or “performers have drinking problems.” However, this was so far from the truth since four of the seven women abstain entirely from drinking and the other three only drink in moderation, including myself. If we had a drink around the time of the show (generally afterwards) it was certainly not to get drunk. Unfortunately, when women are working in the sex industry/erotic dancing /using their bodies onstage in a sexual manner as we were, they face increased (and I believe unfair) scrutiny as it relates to their drug and alcohol use. These are based on stereotypes that connect sex workers with alcohol and drug abuse; clichés about sex workers that we hope to undo. I support the choice to abstain from drugs and alcohol but I in no way believe that one drink or two around the time of performing signals that the performer is nonconsensual in what she is doing onstage or out of her thinking mind. Must all of us completely abstain from drinking in order to combat such stereotypes? I don’t believe so. This is exactly the type of thinking that convinces marginalized peoples to conform to unfairly high standards of moralistic behavior in order to receive the basic respect they deserve; in the process dividing those peoples between those who have internalized that guilt and those who refuse to.

I am very proud to have been part Too Much Pussy: Feminist Sluts in the Queer X Show because it was an empowering experience for me (I think of empowerment as a process, and as a performance artist concerned with questions of sexuality and gender, this was an important part of my personal empowerment process). It was empowering not necessarily because of the sex itself (though the freedom to exercise my queer sexuality as an example to others, with others, in public, in private, in front of the camera or absent of cameras is also part of an empowerment process) and not only because of the time spent onstage, but because of the intimate time spent offstage with other feminists and like-minded queer persons who are intelligent, articulate, fun and loving. Someone who watches the movie can speculate as they wish about my empowerment but I know I speak to the heart of my experience.

I know that this film is not empowering to every woman, but I also know that it is empowering to some. I have already spoken to many young persons of all genders who said they were inspired by the performances and conversations, ideas and spirit they saw in the film. A true story; I was waiting tables on my regular weekly shift at a restaurant in Berlin and two women from Tel Aviv asked me if I was “in a very special movie” that they saw at the LGBTQ film festival in Tel Aviv. Yes! TMP! Yes, I was. They proceeded to tell me that they were inspired by the movie and felt moved by the performances and the words from the performers. Even if it were just those two women, I would be happy for what we’d done because to touch two women in a positive way can be as great as touching 1000. These little moments are what keep me motivated as an artist … to know that there are others out there like me. Some young people, outsiders, queers who do not have access to such films may feel alone in the world, as though there are no others out there like them. This is part of what makes this project important.

That does not mean that someone watching the film necessarily feels inspired to become a whore, but it might help them to feel less ashamed about their queer sexuality.

This leads me to a basic assumption made in the critique that I want to engage with. That is, that it is negative to dream of being a whore (which incidentally I don’t think the movie encourages or discourages, it is merely portrayed as one woman’s dream. Other women had dreams as children of being writers, activists, actresses, preachers, etcetera…)

Because we generally “agree” as a society that it is negative to be a whore (or so this commentator
assumes), it therefore follows that it is negative to dream of being a whore. If we must remain divided on this topic, so be it, but I stand by the following statement and hope to show: There is nothing wrong with being a whore.

Empowered whores and other sex workers have a lot to teach us. By empowered I am speaking of persons who choose this profession, feel that it is good for them at this moment in their life and take loving precautions with their bodies. Whores can teach us basic skills about sex like how to give pleasure to others. They can expand our notions of what different bodies look like. They can get us to think about how to have relationships outside of heteronormative, monogamous ones. Empowered whores can impart their knowledge about how to give pleasure to differently bodied persons. I have had two lovers in my life who have worked or do work as prostitutes, one a cis gendered male one a cis gendered female. Both are educators and great in bed. They taught me a lot about how to have different kinds of sex. In a world where being a whore were not so stigmatized there could be a lot of possibilities for learning from whores. Whores are lovers, healers, and can provide companionship. Whores can teach us about safer sex because an empowered whore takes care of his or her body and is the most knowledgeable person about safer sex practices, far above and beyond the general practices of nonmonagmous people who are not working as whores (even those who think of themselves as young hip and empowered). Whores can teach us about power and help us to challenge the power dynamics that we experience in our primary relationships. Whores can provide sexual energy and attention to those of us in society who have difficulty finding sexual partners, e.g. those who are severely developmentally or physically disabled. Whores provide the outlet for exploring fantasy in a safe surrounding; they provide a framework for exploration of fantasies that society deems as perverse or wrong.

Thanks for taking the time to read this.

With love and respect

Kathryn (Mad Kate)

This question of the sex object always comes up in discussions of women and erotic work. When the question arises it always seems that one big looming fact always gets ignored.

No woman is an object, not a sex object, not any kind of object. She is firstly a human being and perfectly capable of speaking and telling you how she feels on any given day on any given stage. If you want to interpret her as a sexual object because you–or someone else desires her–be prepared that at some point between the desire and the desired sexual act (if it gets that far) you’ll probably discover that this object speaks. In which case, in order to make the fantasy a reality, the real woman not object will always emerge. Secondly, this woman is living in a capitalist economy–she has to pay her rent–and she may or may not also consider herself a performer, an artist, both or all of the above. Why not speak to her and ask how she feels?

20.09.2010. Waiting on the plane for the virgin Atlantic flight to take off from heathrow to san Francisco.

Driving across the midlands in Sweden, I think constantly of my father. My father is always all around me. I think of how he would like to see a moose. I think of childhood camping trips and the sticker from a national park in Maine or Canada. There was, i think, a moose sticker near the little coat closet. When I am renovating the shop, when I am taking down the ceiling, when I am cleaning out the tiles into a big dumpster, I think of him watching me. I think of wishing he were there to help me, or to ask him something. I think of him proud of me for doing some work alone and for figuring out the strange language of renovations, like hiring a dumpster, when the language of German is already foreign.

When I am driving across this wide land I think if him pulling over near a lake just to look at it. I think of how he would appreciate funny signs, or just, the sight of Swedish men eating sausages at the gas station out of doors. My father is all around me. When I am at the shop I am cleaning out the dust and I take down my mask to wipe my face and I just remember how my father cleaned the closet of asbestos and made a new cedar closet on daniel street. It is sometimes strange to have German male friends helping me, or to listen to them talking in the front seat; they do not realize how much they remind me of the mannerisms of my father and have become somehow other fathers to me.

When i am in the gas station on the highway in Sweden looking at the Armoral, i catch myself staring at it for a long time … and then at the WD40, staring at the cans for too long. I remember the last days I was with my father. We chose easy projects for ourselves, like how to put down the bike seat that hadn’t been moved in 20 years. It was so simple in those days; I had the feeling that only one thing had to be planned for a day, the sole task being to buy the wd40. Then we’d go to the Clifton general store and buy the wd40 and come home triumphant, to try to move the damn seat down. Unsuccessful. The next day was another task–we took it together in the pickup to the bike store for the healthy men to move it down, and even they couldn’t do it. But that was our project and it made us feel good.

I think I associate this with maleness; there is no multitasking involved and the accomplishment feels so final. As opposed to femaleness which is many different projects with no beginnings and no endings. Is this fair? Do I miss my father for this straight forward order?

This is how i sometimes feel in the new shop when I am trying to capture all the dust from the cement walls and the more I wipe the more that just keeps coming. Which leaves one a futile kind of feeling, that it never ends. And one begins to think, for what, why, when I can’t stop it, can’t stop illness and death from coming, not from my father or myself, it goes on, ad infinim.

The hardest moments we cannot predict, like when your heart swells looking at a can of armorol in the gas station, and it is predicated on your strange surroundings. What can you do, if it happens then? And what about the birch bark canoe you made as a child, the book about the boat that traveled all if the great lakes? What can you do when you remember this in the car with your bandmates and you have tears in your eyes. Little childhood memories like the fight about Cindy Lauper being a lesbian or not, and me remembering that she was hulk hogan’s girlfriend. When I ride the ferry, any ferry, my heart swells but tears don’t come any more. It is the force of the water and the memory of his joy at water, at boats. For months after my father died I had my daily cry. Then I could let it go. Now it is pent up again. I haven’t cried really cried for my father in months.

Oh leather jacket, you make me so happy when I pull you on again after another short Berlin summer. When I bring you out of the front closet and ask you to take me back. Why did I ever think to leave you? Why? I bought you used, in the heat of an Iowa summer, at a store called cowboys guns and guitars for 60 dollars the day my brother arrived. You were worn but quite fit. You’ve always had a faded tag that says butthole surfers written in sharpie. It’s your only blemish, but I forgive it. You had it then and you have it now. It was so hot and muggy that first summer, I couldn’t have you for months, not really. We only became lovers when I moved to Berlin in October and then you were there for me, inseparable, keeping me warm in the coldest winter. I remember that one night, when I was walking home from Kreuzberg all the way to Kopenhagener Strasse because I didn’t know about the night buses yet and I was too broke for a cab. We were walking along the old wall together at 4 in the morning and I remember how the sideways snow stuck to you and I was still warm. I was 25 and I remember how free I felt; how unhinged and yet protected by myself alone. But it was you and I together. You could be my guardian angel, I just never thought to thank you. How many times have I fallen on sheets of black ice when I’m still riding my bike through the winter and you were there right under me, saving my skin and bones? How many times have you been there for me? We’re such good mates, such a team, you and I. You’re so androgynous, so polyamorous. How many faces have you known? I wear you in my leather daddy fazes but also when I’m just playing Punky Brewster. You were there in the dark room listening to the groans of men I wished I could be. And sometimes just for a strip tease, with naked breasts underneath. You feel so smooth and strong. When I’m broken hearted you make me feel much tougher than I am. You’re like black eyeliner but much more resilient. You’re not too elegant but you’re so daring when you mix with glamour. You’re so casual and utilitarian when I’m just punking about. You and I, we can pick up girls and guys, we’ve sat on wooden stools and listened to bluegrass, we’ve sailed over mosh-pit heads and hands. I’ve shoved you in the piss corner of dark clubs; you’ve never run off with someone else—without me. It is raining these days and you keep me dry, even the stupid expensive electronics which I love to hate, you keep them dry in my pocket so I can keep listening to my music with my headphones on and feet scrambling my pedals. Oh leather jacket I love you. I never carry a knife but I might be. I can carry my knife when I do and when I’m not I might be. I could keep that blade right next to my heart and you wouldn’t let it knick me. You have so many pockets, so many places, I keep everything in you because I am always embarrassed to carry a purse. You never make me act like a girl. You make me feel like a boy with tits and a cunt. You make me feel like me. You’re so sexy, you’ve starred in porn—more than once. You’re immortalized on screen. You’ve tasted glass and broken mirrors and dirt. I would use you as a mattress in a greyhound bus station in Montana. Your elbow is falling out, you carry my pen. My many pens. My notebook too. And that’s all I really need in life is a pen and paper and place to lay my head. I like to chew on you; you’re such a nice cud. I’ve left my bite marks, I’ve even torn your skin. I like to smell you just so I won’t have to smell everything else. I can turn up your collar if I want to. You’ve covered my eyes. You’ve covered my heart, you’ve held it, when it was too heavy to bear myself. I wear you with a black leather hat and I fit right in where I want to fit. I like to wear you with an expensive dress and high heels and dare my bike to rip couture. You never just rip. I would wear you to the ball, if they’d let me in. I’d invite you along to Bollywood or Hollywood or a punk rock show. I’d wear you to the ballet. You never smell like all the cum blood or sweat—you always just smell like you, that old familiar leather smell. That girl gang beat me up in an abandoned factory out east and dragged me across the gravel by your very sleeves. You were still there all that time. Your zipper has never broke. Not once. You’re cool in the warmer months and heavy like stone, never just a little whisper in my ear. You’re not a tease at all; you’re so direct. Your weight bears into me. I feel how real you are. I could never pretend, you are not there at all. I have no other jacket but thee, not in truth. You are the one for me. All the others are just second best. We’ve gone smoking cigarettes together on those rare broody evenings I have to smoke cigarettes and walk the city streets alone like an alley cat. You’ve laid on the sidewalk with me and cried. You never have to be fed, not like my voracious hunger, but you let me spill on you all the time. You cat around with me, you bike with me to lovers and guide me home again, guilty, electrified, scared or in love. You always hide my tears. You are sturdy and tall enough to be a pillow. I’ve slept in you, in my very own bed, without any pants on, just you. I’ve refused to take you off when my partner tries to part you from me. You’ve slept in the middle of the two of us, but you’ve never come between us. Tomek tried to sew you up once on his leather machine but you’re still tearing at all the edges. It just makes you more beautiful, the way you are fading and opening and giving us both more air. Leather jacket, how I love thee. My eyes are wet with adoration. You are for me and I am for you.

Most of the comments I get when I’m dancing I brush under the rug. Most I even forget, never write about. Most I don’t immortalize. But I didn’t get on this stage without a reason or without passion. I never stop asking myself the same questions. How do we make the strip tease subversive, how do we communicate pleasure; do I LIKE this? What do they think, does it make a difference.

Something about the other night compels me to write again. Maybe the same thing I always write, draw the same conclusions I always draw. It began with the boy who gave me the finger when I got on stage and said something about this—me—being total shit. That was before I even began to move and then when I began he stood there at the front of the audience with his back to me onstage and his middle fingers raised to me (couldn’t even face me with his insult). He was dressed as a “punk” of all things. I trust punks. Somehow one expects that kind of behavior from the so-called “bad macho boss,” not that he would do that in a physical way but that he would do that with the way that he “treats” and “values” you (But how is this measured anyway? In cash? Is this “value”?). But you don’t expect it from a punk—punks are political and edgy. A punk would throw the finger at the capitalist MAN. So I think, while I’m dancing, he must associate me with the capitalist man. And I must be the enemy.

That shook me somehow, which made my head go into analysis mode, which means I dance like shit. Then I’m disqualified me from sexinesss and this pisses me off more. I had given him the benefit of the doubt, thinking, yea, if I didn’t look like a classic femme stripper tonight I would be subverting this image that he clearly has a problem with. I was trying to give this guy some intellect.

I thought in my head, I should “do something” to subvert this stereotype that I appear to be playing right now. After all, isn’t this what I’ve devoted my performance career to? But then I thought again—really? Really? The only way to hold respect up here is to refuse to look like the so-called bimbo every stripper supposedly is? I thought—really—do I really have to work at subverting this stereotype when we’re all a bunch of clichés? You’re HERE. You’re paying entrance, buying a gin-tonic, supporting this establishment, coming up to the front of this dance floor, acting like you control what should happen on this stage. This is a capitalist role-play—you buying and me providing. If I wear a mustache to subvert something in YOUR head—does that really change anything about me? Does that really make me a different person? What if today I feel like wearing lace—wouldn’t doing exactly what I WANT be way more subversive than trying to guess at what you want?

A part of me wished I had kicked that asshole in the head with my red stiletto, but in truth I don’t believe in violent protest, so I didn’t, I confronted him verbally from the stage by asking if there was a problem. He still wouldn’t look at me but his girlfriend, who was apparently trying to pacify him, said, no, there is no problem and I said, you know, this is my job. I shouldn’t have said that, I should have said, don’t give me the finger. I enjoy being up here. I enjoy dancing. I enjoy taking my clothes off. What makes you think you can determine what happens in this club on this stage just because you paid entrance. This isn’t a fucking McDonalds.

Tell me something. Tell me I’m a bad stripper and your mother would have turned you on more than me, or that I’ve got no rhythm and I look haggard and have dark circles under my eyes. That would have been rude but straightforward. But don’t give me the finger for no reason when I step onstage. Back it up; don’t just be hostile at my very presence.

I couldn’t actually know what it was that bothered that boy. Was I even right? Was he an anti-porn feminist that couldn’t stand to see girls get naked because he just cared so much? Was he trying to “save me”? Did he just hate how I looked? Did he think I was co-opting the punk image and selling it back to him in the form of stripper? God forbid—as though punk were anything about fashion. It was “punk against punk, feminist against feminist.”

But God, without knowing each other all of these identities are so meaningless.

MGMT or some other whiney boy indie rock was playing and it was all a joke. Then they played “Killing in the Name” by Rage Against the Machine and everyone sang “some of those that work forces, are the same that burn crosses” and half of them probably didn’t understand what they were saying. And they yelled, “fuck you I won’t do what you tell me” … but were happy to switch to the juxtaposed song, which was, Prodigy, “slap my bitch up, slap my bitch up.”

I don’t know. All I hear are the lyrics; I take words at face value. I see his middle finger. I feel the sweat on my body. Are these shoes any good for moving? It makes me want to do more of it. It makes me think, fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me. It makes me think, every image I could possibly wear at this moment is a cliché of a cliché of a cliché. But getting to know each other—loving each other—respecting each other—that is punk. That is subversive. That will break down stereotypes.

I finish my 20 minutes and walk to the backstage which is where the girls are, naked and unabashed and raw. Sometimes I think I love strippers and whores more than any other kind of person in the world. We know what we mean and backstage we understand. We have to. We don’t know why we have to fight for a place to change when we’re backstage or why 18 year old boys are sitting on our panties and we have to actually say, can you get off my panties? We just do.

You could say, man that really sucks you should work somewhere else but it’s all the same, almost all backstages are the same crowded places where you can’t see what you’re doing and random people sit on your things. So you just get used to it. You get used to the roadies backstage, even at the biggest festivals who tell you they can’t provide a light next to the stage because of the band. But I AM PART OF THE BAND you say. He is talking about being edgy and artistic and subversive and all you want is a light to see yourself and he can’t give it to you. It’s that simple.

When I go take a break at the bar some guy tells me, “I can’t believe you are here. I mean you—you are so much more than this. You are an artist! You sing! My god this is such shit.” And he’s thinking he’s complimenting me, he says, “she—this is all she has.” He’s referring to my colleague whom I love with a passion this person cannot fathom. “But you—you’re worth more.”

Who the hell does this guy think he is? That girl—she’s a slut and she’s my best friend yea! Rebel girl! Queen of my world! Has radical sex politics, loves her body, flaunts her sexuality, doesn’t care. Enjoys herself –us together—we enjoy ourselves naked and free and dirty.

Don’t tell me I’m worth more than what I’m doing especially after watching my show with a drink in your hand you bought from my employer. I know that I’m worth every teacher artist non-profit worker activist street cleaner suicide bomber soldier and body alive or dead killed in war, any human being any house wife cleaning diapers any farm worker or slave. That’s a whole lot of nothing and a whole of everything.

And oh—quick—someone wants to take my picture.

It all makes me want to dance more. Fuck being an artist, because I do the same thing in the name of art in a gallery and everyone claps their clean hands? Then we can all call ourselves edgy and be pleased. And if not there, then the strip club. It belongs there—can’t be inbetween. All the bullshit makes me want to jump headlong into it more raw, more confronting, more affronting.

Because why is there so much analysis placed on this capitalist work as opposed to any other? When I’m waiting tables—does anyone ever tell me, you’re worth more than this? Do they give me the finger when they see me because they’re worried about my role in this capitalist establishment? No. No they don’t, because I’m not taking off my clothes or confronting them with sexuality in an overt way. I’m bringing them a drink.

And what is WORTH. Worth is something invented by capitalists and some religions in terms of how we’ll be judged for the afterlife. When I am waitressing I never get told—you’re more of an artist than THIS. Actually I get told, “I can’t believe you won’t split my check into 5 separate bills so each of us can pay with our very own Visa mileage plus credit cards so I can get extra miles for my trips around the world, and are you an idiot that you can’t figure out how to accommodate us on the computer?”

Do we do that with any occupations other than sex work, do we say, categorically, on a daily basis, you’re better than this? Do comments and analysis that sex workers and dancers receive get so absorbed as normal in any other milieu? What about jobs where the employee is actually acting in a violent manner? Did we say to the CEO of BP, Tony, man, you should really think about this job, this off shore oil drilling thing you’re doing. You’re so much better than this. We never say this to our soldiers. We don’t say, God, Maria, you used to be an artist, why do you go around killing people, you’re better than this! In fact all of our responses are to taking care of them, the victim response, taking care of you wearing yellow ribbons around my wrist to show that I support the troops and want them to come home. But a good minded person wouldn’t turn their hostility to the solider him or herself. We say, bring them home when we can. Even a corrupt business owner who we’ve caught red-handed—we may punish him for his infringements, but we never question his motivation for being involved with the business in the first place.

For a while I thought, it’s up to me, it’s up to me to subvert THIS THING I do. It’s up to my body to carry the weight of the analysis so they understand and see it all differently. See my enjoyment. See the worth in my dancing. Change their minds that we’re not all “sex objects.” But I am very clearly not an object.

I have worked in this field for a long time now and I am beginning to think that even the subverted gender stereotype, even this is not the final transgression. Not that we shouldn’t continue to play with gender. But to believe that the surface image is where the revolution happens—that is simply to play into the superficiality of the worn body at all, the gender we are wearing. If I were to be me (and I can be nothing else) and to put on mustache or to shave my heard or to wear a suit a dick three breasts fake ass implants whatever it is. I am still beyond all of those things.

It began with the question, what is subversive strip tease? But why do I have to ask this question about strip tease or porn or sex work at all? Why is this work inherently worthless and wrong and condemned and disrespected?

I thought the point was that I am worth more than what I am doing, presumably more than what I am wearing. If we really believed in this idea of the worth of bodies, more than what we are wearing or doing, than we would not care if a woman were clothed “too much” (i.e. veiled) or clothed too little (i.e. stripping or prostituting). We would not care if a body were transgendered or had a beard and a pussy.

Even my desire to subvert my own image, to “not be” the blond bimbo archetype reflects an internalized idea that body means anything at all. But what about the Goth stereotype the queer stereotype the dyke stereotype the punk the Emily the strange the suicide girl the femme fatal the fifties pinup. My God its exhausting. I can’t keep up.

It’s virtually impossible to subvert an image with another image. We cannot feed shaved headed girl to a long haired girl and call it better—or a transgendered person to a bio femme and call it better.

I am not sure even how queer a queer image can be, at heart when that what is really queer, and what is really revolutionary, and what is really powerful, is working at relationships with each other, receiving each other with love, understanding each other, trying to find out about each other, making assumptions for the positive, supporting each other on good and bad days. Are these not simple things.

After nine months you expect a birth. And if there is no birth, you induce labor. That’s what I’ve been told they do these days. 2 April was nine months passing since my father’s death and the week of the full moon. Father’s “passing.” Instead of a birth I had a nervous breakdown, as though I was looking around wondering, where is the baby already, where is the birth? Where’s the body, the baby, the body? Looking for evidence of something grown and in its visible absence a sense of enlarged emptiness, resting inside me more empty than it had been the day before, and the day before that.

Already gone. Those nine months already gone. It took those same nine months to finish my journal, almost nine months to the day, from when I began it on a plane flying home to Virginia the day after my father’s death. And when I closed its thick green leather binding on 2 April I knew I would no longer see my father’s face each day (staring up at me from the Tastee 29 Diner) on the funeral program I had pasted inside it. I knew it was the end of a chapter. And I had to ask myself, what had I done in all those nine months, recorded here on those pages?

Where was the birth? Isn’t that a biblical story? Shrouded in mystery, I do not understand why he got so sick and why it happened like it did. I’m not even sure exactly what the fuck happened at all. You expect a birth and when there no birth, man, you induce the labor, don’t you. Where’s the baby? Where’s the baby? I ask hysterically. Nine months went shooting by me like ways we don’t understand. I can’t even remember what happened, just that the day after the funeral I was hiding my head from two loud fat Austrian men trying to sleep on train from Vienna to Milan and then sprinting faster than I’d ever had to from one train to another in Venice and suddenly onstage by a lake with a top hat on and singing, “don’t look back, don’t look back.”

Nine months shooting past me like a high speed train; the projects, the performances, the backstages. I have taken so many trips, physical trips and yet my taste buds are dulled, at times I cannot see the brightness of it. What have learned, what risks have I taken, what’s worth mentioning? So much, a flood of excitement, of artists around us with strong desires and stronger ideas, but where do I put all this? Why do I not feel it the way that I want to? Is it just a list to be made, another Facebook update? The emotions feel immature and backward, ungrateful, retrograde. As though now I experience again the pain that I experienced in his sickness, which was more intense that the day that he died. That was somehow a lifting, somehow it was a breath.

These days, I cannot fill my lungs.

Juan always says, it’s mathematical, you should understand it, with your mathematical mind. And I always resist him saying, that’s not mathematics at all. Mathematics is the sine wave that I used to describe the first time I fell in love. It is the never arriving asymptote of a “truth.” Numbers and rationality, that is not mathematics at all. But somehow he has me right; I am constantly attempting to number it, to order it all, down to a set of numbers; the number of coffee cups, the number of times you said a certain thing. One could number everything in one’s life, to understand it. To create a story out of numbers. And every time the story would be different, depending on what you are counting. Number the scars on my body; this one, that one; number the mornings waking up, throwing open the window and laughing at a grimace: “set your spirit free!”—I shout like the little girl that I am. Number the crocuses; is it spring yet?

And then of course it was the obsession with the number of days since he’d died. The further away, an increased sense of shock and of trying not to let it go, not to let time pass. On the day that I found out about Tomek’s death it was like a ton of bricks on everything else; I was cold with paralysis. Overcooked. Add it to the list of things. It will be mentioned, at some point, will be processed. Take a number and drive the car. And that’s what I did, I drove straight to Switzerland in our tour bus and when we reached Basel (and this is how strange life is at the moment, and by the moment I mean, for the past several years, these strange things) I found, there, in the backstage, I found a poster of the Kamikaze Queens playing live at Sudhaus with a band called Denner Clan on the 8th of July, 2009. That was the exact day of my father’s funeral in Fairfax, Virginia, and indeed, I was absent from the concert in Basel, Switzerland. I was in fact, in Northern Virginia, perhaps in church at the very moment that my band was onstage without me in Basel. But there I was in the poster, there I was with a knife in hand, marking me somehow into history as being in two places at one time. But only I knew that. Or cared. And to make it more surreal, some clever vandal had given me a lovely large beard—a bearded lady in the circus.

Well I have been meaning to write you this letter for nine months. Every thought of mine is a letter, it’s always an attempt at relating, a bit of words that never make it to the page. I meant to write to you all about all the shows, and about Tomek, about what he means to me, how devastated I am to miss him. I meant to write it all out to you, to relate it to you. I thought this letter to you for nine months. And then suddenly they were just passed and where was the birth?

For ten years my father was working on proving the Alon Saks Seymour conjecture, which he told me, shortly before he died, he had begun to doubt could never be proved. And that even Alon Saks Seymour himself had begun to doubt its validity. My father’s notes on this were what my mother and I called his “x and o” papers. It was a system he’d developed for himself to figure out the conjecture and they lay scattered over his entire house. When I found them, I didn’t want to move them, no matter what the location, no matter how many.

“Dear Eva,” writes my father’s colleague, Walter, on 8 April 2010, nine months to the day after my father’s funeral, “Professor Benny Sudakov of UCLA and his student Hao Huang have disproved the Alon Saks Seymour conjecture! … Here is a link to their paper: http://www.math.ucla.edu/~bsudakov/ass-conjecture.pdf … I would like to have discussed this with Klaus.”

Maybe this is the birth.

A girl learns many things from her father. I could say: I learned everything I know about being a woman from my father, even though I know perfectly well this is not true at all. That is, at some perspective, it is entirely true and within another, not true at all. Even when he did not teach me about being a girl, he taught me about being a boy and therefore, a girl who could be a boy. If he did not teach me about what a girl should do, he perhaps taught me about all the things a girl could do. Even when he never mentioned girlhood or boyhood or womanhood at all, still he showed me, in his own way, with his pride at my boyhood and his subtle acknowledgement of my womanhood that I could be a combination of many things. And when he disliked my womanhood his disapproval also strengthened my need to articulate myself. In this sense, everything good, bad, approved and not approved, was influenced by this figure, my father.

Yesterday I was riding my purple bicycle and smiling to think about how I had to hold the gear shift in just a certain way so that I could ride in a higher gear without the chain falling off. I thought of how much my father would enjoy this lazy trick to avoid paying for repair or doing something about it myself. These memories come back to me often now, without warning, raging in like a storm and leave me, at times, crushed with sadness.

There are a series of moments that flood over me when I think of the way my father strengthened dichotomies in me: The strong girl mowing the lawn, cutting down the blackberry shrub. How much he loved this moment and reminded me yearly about this experience together. How he expressed pride when I broke into the house; how he congratulated me on the day I first got my period and I was holding a drill from having installed the curtains in my bedroom. How proud he was of me, how much he loved my capability. It must have made me realize, I could never stop being a boy at heart.

He was the person that taught me to ride a bike in high heels (because you should always pedal with the ball of you foot), install curtains on the first day of my period (because that is as good as any day), wear frilly expensive panties on the inside of grungy thrift store clothes (wear what you receive and don’t buy it yourself). No, he taught me none of these things, and yet—they were somehow a result of him. In essence he taught me about my own bisexuality and androgyny; that I could be male and female, love women and men, be intellectual and artist. I love to think how he shaped and touched me even in the ways that he taught me negative behavior, even in the ways that he reacted with suspicion or rejection of the things that were/are important to me.

At the time, in those moments, of course, I never felt grateful for his suspicion, his questions, for example, about my hair. “Why did you cut your hair like that, Katie? Will you always leave it like that?” I remember having to work through a theoretical series of responses before being able to deliver even one in real time—and this always felt teenage, defensive, and pedantic.

I remember that in the last couple of years my father read some of my writing on queer performance and when I visited him in Virginia shortly thereafter, he told me while riding in the truck: “I enjoyed your writing, but does all this stuff about performance and female sexuality really matter all that much?” And somehow, to my dismay, I recognized what he meant—in the sense that I could concede to see where he was coming from. And I relinquished for a moment instead of chirping back with teenage defensiveness. “Sure,” I said, “I guess in some sense ‘female sexuality and performance’ doesn’t matter all that much.”

But now that I reflect on that moment I realize that he felt similarly about his obsession with mathematics—not really that it didn’t matter, or that it was futile, or that he would give up trying to figure out that one problem, but rather that in the larger scheme of things certain mathematical problems didn’t matter all that much except to him. So when I asked him about the mathematical problem he spent fifteen years contemplating without finding any answer, he also conceded. “What will really happen if you figure it out?” I asked. And he answered, “Nothing. Absolutely nothing, Katie.”

In fairness, it must have been, always will be, difficult for my father to understand and to empathize with my relationship to sexuality—and I am probably speaking of my mother as well. For one thing, my relationship to sexuality has changed and evolved a lot in the last twelve years, a lot for such a short period of time. A parent has to empathize one way and then another way and it must seem as though their child is always changing and demanding a new understanding all the time—and most of the time they’re not even close enough to catch up on all the minute changes along the way.

You tell them you’ve been raped and they’re outraged and scared and fearful, you tell them you’re bisexual and they’re skeptical, you tell them you’re married and they’re relieved—but then why all these performances about gender and sexuality? And perhaps they can only think how traumatized you must be, or hurt, or broken. But actually you’re just developing and learning and doing your thing and it feels good to you.

In some sense there will never be an entirely happy ending; a father and a girl’s sexuality are always at odds, or almost always set up to be so. He is the model for all men; he is the expectation of all men; his fears of men are her fears of men; his imaginings of other men as predatory are as real as men being so. And as well it should be for him; he would have his daughter believe he is the safest man in the whole world.

And looking back at him, perhaps he was. Even though I know, perfectly well, this is not true at all.

Generations don’t end evenly and ages don’t define relationships. Sometimes I am my aunt’s sister and sometimes I am my mother’s mother. I hope that sometimes she feels me to be her sister, her friend. Sometimes my brother is my father. When my father is too sick to change the oil and pick me up. When he cannot drive himself home and his oxygen is running out. Sometimes my brother is my best friend when he is the only one who wants to talk to me about the mutual experience of losing our father. Sometimes I am the deadbeat dad who didn’t take care of my brother when he was growing up with an alcoholic father and an angry mother. Sometimes I am the teenage mother who left her kid with his grandmother and ran off to face her future. Sometimes I am my brother’s child, when I am crying thinking of a memory of our father that he does not remember, when I am thinking of a memory that hasn’t happened yet—one that our father will not share with us; a bike ride he won’t take with us. Sometimes in the ocean’s waves I cry deeply thinking of my father and I playing together in the water as though siblings; thinking of holding my brother like a son; feeling desperate responsibility to protect him from the breathtaking force of the undertow.