Shit List Day 4: Family Values

Rather than go in to a critique of patriarchy, or the potential damage of bad families, I want to look at the idea of family as an exclusionary anti/social unit. Patriarchal families have been extremely bad for women and children, and that should always be named because it is infuriating and unacceptable. However right now I am primarily interested in having some conversations about how the family itself serves to obstruct a more supportive social system overall.

Families function to favor the set of people who are Blood Relations over the set of people who are Others. From the healthiest to the most oppressive, families all share a relationship to the question of who counts as family and who doesn’t. This way of dividing up the world has been completely exploited in the everyone-for-themselves capitalist system.  Economic oppression thrives in part on the idea that I don’t owe anything to anyone except my own flesh and blood. We can all do better. Queer people are here to do better. We are here to destroy family values.

When it comes to providing empathy and taking responsibility, our culture teaches us to prioritize family members over all the other humans to whom we are not related. Of course empathy and responsibility are not actually limited resources. But that is another conversation, because in our consumer culture we behave as though everything were a limited resource. So the idea of family enshrines care for a tiny set of people and diminishes responsibility for the rest. This fundamental aspect of family values is considered admirable because it is usually described as a form of loyalty.

The underside of family loyalty is a social order that lacks care for many, many, many, many people who need it. The system is set up to create a no-win situation where struggling families are simply not up to the multitude of challenges facing them, including emotional, economic, health challenges. Then the state and the community get to evade responsibility by pointing to some imagined moral failing of those same families.

In my birth family, two of the four of us were periodically hospitalized for mental illnesses and we certainly could have used some support from outside. But there we were, closed up in our suburban house, a family that offered little to its members and was unknown to others. We were not Family to anyone else. In other words, we were not in the set of cared-for people belonging to anyone capable of providing actual care.

So you say some families value empathy, healing, service, and caring for others? They are on their way to destroying family values and building new ones. Your family is a big household full of friends who chose to be together? Your family is tiny but made up of people who consider the babysitter a sister? You are building new family values. The old and the new live together side-by-side today, and sometimes you can feel the conflict happening. It doesn’t exactly help that we use the same word for both more open and more closed family systems. We all need a new normal. The default cannot remain the family that excludes. Right now many families straddle two worlds, waiting for the new to begin as the old passes away. We need to think carefully about what we wish to preserve from this contested territory.

On one hand, I want the new normal to question the ethics of valuing some people over others. The concept of family hinges on who is in and who is out. The conventional idea of family is based on the exclusion of the immoral, unwholesome other, in other words, the queer, the person who is with somebody the others do not approve of, the "illegitimate" child, etc. We have all had enough of that!

On the other hand, I want to note even the most loving family as currently constructed is still isolated and very often not up to all the work we expect from it. The family is inadequate to provide individuals with all the social, emotional and economic support that would make for healthier, flourishing human beings.

So the family is failing those it excludes, then under pressure it is failing those included as well. The family is failing, failing, failing. Can gay marriage be part of both the old and the new? It seems to me to hold too fast to the old. In the wrong hands, gay marriage serves to further de-legitimize our tribes and families of choice. NPR has provided some minimal coverage of conscientious objectors to gay marriage by inviting Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore on as a guest on at least 2 occasions. Recently there was coverage of the NY marriage decision, and the same interviewer who has spoken with Mattilda awkwardly brought up the fact that some gays think there is something “special” to preserve about gayness, separate and apart from marriage. A guy about to marry his long-time boyfriend responded, “Yes but we are tired of being second-class citizens.” Was he referring to the ability to marry, or is that what single people and unmarried lovers are? Or is that what people in relationships outside monogamy are? I found his response illuminating because it spoke on many levels regardless of whether the speaker would deny or confirm my reading. If anything, it is heterosupremacism that makes us second-class citizens, not the law in isolation and not the status of being unmarried. I wonder how single straight people felt hearing that interview.

The meaning of family may be contested but real families in the real world still kick out queer children and sometimes drive them to suicide. Real families still struggle and implode under pressures that are simply too great. We cannot rehabilitate that shit by simply demanding a place within it. Our presence alone will not do the trick. We need better values where care includes people who are neither your relatives nor connected to you by the rule of the state, and where a variety of relationships are respected. Before we jump to perpetuate a system that exists at our expense, we might consider whether we want to continue to even use the word “family.” But in the meantime, let’s preserve a practice well embedded in the queer community’s history and in our best present moments: caring for one another regardless of blood or law.

Pulling on the Marriage Thread

What is at stake for straight people in taking up the fight against homophobia? Now I am not talking about cheering from the sidelines or supporting gay marriage from the couch, checkbook or even the voting booth. In order to cultivate better friendships, I have to wonder what it will mean for straight people to really stand with queers. Some of my straight friends are very invested in this question too. Just a few times in my life, I have been asked with the utmost sincerity for help understanding homophobia. I deeply appreciate being asked. Connecting with the straight people I love around homophobia very much informs my understanding of this heterosupremacist culture where available explanations of homophobia have proven so inadequate. And seeing people willing to challenge their own hetero privilege is powerful and has strengthened me in my belief that it can be done. So what is the cost for those who authentically and sincerely desire to be with us in the struggle? And how is it connected to the fears of those who would do anything to stop us?

Injustice wouldn’t be so enduring if it weren’t benefiting anyone. To explore the question of what is at stake for straight people, we need to look for what they get out of the status quo. What do straight people stand to lose, for instance, if queer people get married? Why is marriage such an infuriating issue for homophobic people? Marriage is a loose thread I would like to pull and pull and see what falls apart. There are a million more issues to explore, arguably a million times more important that marriage. Yet no matter how hard most queer people try to have a vision of justice larger than matrimony, marriage comes up again and again (and again) as the singular issue that commands everyone’s attention. 

Gay marriage will secure some rights for some gays. It will not create real change for queer people and certainly will not convert marriage from a patriarchal ownership compact into a baggage-free expression of love. And yet there is such strong opposition and a lot of support and all kinds of emotion surrounding this issue. From both the support and all the opposition, it seems to me we are actually talking about marriage not only as a legal institution but also as a marker of moral righteousness. And this is illuminating because it reveals some of the underlying, unstated beliefs in this so-called debate. It’s illuminating because it suggests more of an explanation of why people are so worked up! If gays marry, it will spoil the congratulatory marriage discourse by making marriage less wholesome. Beyond the legal benefits, gift registry and reception expense, marriage is all about conferring moral goodness. Beyond Proposition 8 court battles are people’s concepts of good and evil.

For a long time I struggled to pinpoint the homophobia in people’s steady stream of marriage congratulations. Wedding talk has always been extremely stressful for me. I have never been able to authentically relate to the fuss over engagement and marriage, so I have observed the way people behave in order to be able to make some semblance of a socially acceptable response to engagement announcements. (I’m kind of like an anthropologist that way, or a sociopath.) Finally I realized it is not the couple or the displaying of the ring that scares me. It’s the fawning and more so the pressure for everyone to fawn. In order to be perceived as a moral person, or even as a person at all, I have to provide my compulsory approval for compulsory heteronormativity. I can’t bring myself to fawn, but I have trained myself to ask a few cursory questions about the proposal and wedding planning process. This banter is a form of social affirmation reserved for heterosexuals. It is more than simply being happy for somebody. It is congratulating them on joining the morally wholesome ranks of The Family.

Hi B,

I was thinking about our conversation yesterday, and about the part on how you don't want to NOT be happy for a friend who is engaged or expecting. And I assured you that is not what I want. Yet there is a grain of truth here- there will be a loss. On a personal level, I still want you to be happy. But the truth is that if straight folks start to really understand homophobia and how it functions in hetero social structures (including conventional gender roles) to exclude what is queer, it will be less fun to be straight. And you can't NOT notice anymore. If straight folks really start to understand how homophobia works, looks and sounds, well, it will be kind of deafening. It will no longer be unproblematic to participate in a hetero-reinforcing behaviors all the time. "Straight" won't easily mean honest and good anymore. People will start to notice when they are enjoying camaraderie that's about how men and women are supposed to relate. Everyone can still love their family but you won't be able to assume every human aspires to a life just like yours, or that it is totally natural, and you will have to think about how to love any current or future queer family member and how to include them. So queerness actually does jeopardize family values. It doesn't destroy them, it just shows how stuff people think is wholesome, natural, normal, universal is actually painfully exclusive when you are on the receiving end. (Dr. Laura was right to be afraid of us!) No seriously, it will be less fun. I didn't say no fun, just less fun.

For NY Times Liberals who passively support gay marriage, they maintain their moral superiority while allowing some of us to be superior too, at least those of us who want to live in monogamous couples and raise children. (In today’s baby-madness cult of motherhood, we have conveniently forgotten/erased the married straight people who do not want children.) Most liberals are willing to permit queer peoples’ entry into the realm of the morally good if we shape our lives along the same lines as theirs, substituting a “same sex” partner where an “opposite sex” partner would be. For them, marriage confers its moral superiority by collecting moral touchstones like the state, monogamy, permanence, romantic love and parenting into a super-set of moral goodness.  Queers can exist in relationship to that moral goodness as long as we accept all the other premises too. This conditionality might not be explicitly articulated, but instead manifests in beliefs like: Gays are just normal people like us! But some are really a little too “out there.” In this liberal assessment of queerdom, the vast majority of us are excluded, transgender people are consistently ignored and left out, and mainstream-minded gays are allowed to loudly insist they are representative. No substantive change occurs in the culture, no self-examination, just a small renegotiation of barriers. There is zero loss of privilege or moral superiority in the liberal framework, in fact, the life choices of liberals are reinforced by the idea that everyone really just wants the same things they want.

For Fox News Conservatives who oppose gay marriage, any entry of queers into marriage jeopardizes their moral dominance.  They cannot maintain their moral superiority if marriage becomes tainted, because unlike liberals who will still feel good about marriage and their liberal world, conservatives will no longer be able to feel good about their conservative world if gays are in it.  For them, marriage confers its moral superiority precisely through the exclusion of degenerate queers, and by collecting moral touchstones like the church, monogamy, purity, permanence, parenting, family values and heritage. Queers cannot exist in relationship to morality because by definition we are immoral, even if we are married and monogamous and conform to societal expectations in every single way but one. Clearly there is zero loss of privilege or moral superiority in this conservative framework, in fact, getting outraged by the gay rights movement bolsters their self-image as morally good. Protesters at the dyke march and gay pride clearly derive a great satisfaction from their own superiority. We can observe their pleasure at these events. In a more benign-seeming form, straight people who recommend civil unions may be responding subconsciously to the threat to their moral self-valuation. They are conflicted. They want to be fair but they don’t want to give up any of their own moral righteousness. The thing that makes marriage special for conservatives is the conference of morality, bringing the married couple up a level on the moral hierarchy. And the way to keep straight marriage moral is to keep queer people immoral.

Whether embedded in liberal tolerance or conservative intolerance, heterosupremacism as a persistent social structure will more than likely survive gay marriage unscathed. For me, the liberal version is still soul-crushing in how it seeks to diminish our uniqueness and sets normality as a gatekeeper to recognition. (I came out as a lesbian in my early twenties but I’ve always been queer and never been normal.) In the liberal version we still have to conform in order to be recognizable as human beings, and in the conservative version no matter how much we conform we can never be recognizable. Heterosupremacism wins whenever liberals tolerate our palatable differences and whenever conservatives condemn those same differences. Either way, being straight is central and being queer is marginal. Either way, most of us do not even get to be part of the argument.

Queer freedom requires dislodging heterosexuality from its central position. It will make heterosexuality less awesome… but will also open a whole world of human expression to queer and straight people alike, and everyone else too. Examples of how forced heteronormative conformity hurts straight people are everywhere. Dismantling heterosupremacism will require us to see more people as fully human, including more unmarried people, gender nonconforming people, childless people, sex workers, single parents, recluses, sluts, faeries, people with all different kinds of sexualities and life arrangements. More possibilities will open up for everyone when heterosupremacism is named and disputed and undermined.

With those expanded possibilities will come loss. A lot of people in many different places in society will enjoy less moral self-satisfaction, and that will be a loss for straight people regardless of what other privileges and/or forms of discrimination they face in terms of gender, race, class, age or anything. For liberals and conservatives alike, disrupting heterosupremacism will produce an uncomfortable sensation of the ground shifting underfoot. It may even be a devastating loss for some to realize that such a source of pride, the traditional marriage, is just one of many ways to arrange our love relationships. Heterosexuality and heteronormative lifestyles can no longer remain admirable in and of themselves. People are proud of their families. Part of that pride comes from feeling morally good, and getting admiration and acknowledgement. Part of that goodness, admiration and acknowledgement is rooted in being Not Queer, but normal and natural and wholesome. That’s the part needs to go. And it’s a big one. Maybe acknowledging the loss will help us move our energy forward instead of in this tiresome circular marriage conversation. We cannot tiptoe around heterosupremacism but we have to acknowledge that we are asking people not only to make an intellectual move but an emotional one too. The conversation I hope to have with straight people is not the tedious recitation of similarities and differences, but the difficult examination of all that is at stake in our solidarity.

Number 19

One evening I started to develop intense pain on the left side of my jaw. I went to bed hoping I could sleep it off and woke up needing to see the dentist immediately. He took some x-rays and could not find anything wrong. He tapped on individual teeth with various instruments but everything hurt. He asked me if anything happened, if I fell or anything hit me in the face. Nothing like that happened. The dentist thought maybe it was just an infection so I got some antibiotics and hoped for the best.

A couple days later, I was back. Still no sign of tooth decay, and nothing wrong on the x-ray. My dentist sent me for a second opinion, to a specialist. I went to the specialist's office by the entrance to the Manhattan Bridge and she took an x-ray and examined my mouth. She said #19 was cracked and asked me if anything happened, if I got hit in the mouth or got into an accident or anything. I said no. She said, "Even a long time ago? Even when you were a little kid?"

Well, yeah, when I was little, my brother punched me in the face. But that must have been something like 25 years ago at this point. Was it on the left side? Fortunately fist fighting was not a regular occurrence, so I remember it clearly. I had my back against the inside of the front door of the house. My brother is left-handed, and I blocked 3 predictable lefts in a row, but he surprised me with a right to the jaw. That would be my left side. He is seven years older than me. I must have been around 10 or 12 years old at the most. I remember not feeling anything. My mom was there. She took me for a walk. She didn't prevent it from happening and she didn't discuss it with me afterward. We left my brother at home and went for a walk.

At some point during that walk I realized my mouth was throbbing. I didn't say anything. There was no doctor or dentist visit. My mom, brother and I acted as if it never happened. The privacy of the patriarchal household allows for an infinite number of atrocious events to go unseen and unregulated. Often I am sincerely grateful that things never got worse than they were, because there was absolutely nothing stopping them from escalating. The possibility was always there.

The second opinion dentist said I needed a root canal and more likely an extraction. She said some other things that didn’t register after the word "extraction," and put an x-ray into an envelope for me to bring back to my dentist. So I wandered out of her office back into Chinatown, thinking about all this personal history.  My own dentist couldn’t see me immediately, so I had some time to spare for walking and thinking. I walked further downtown to my dentist, whose office is near City Hall, and he still felt reluctant to drill because the x-ray didn't actually show anything. He said once we open the tooth, there is no turning back, and he couldn’t live with himself if he opened a live tooth. (Really, Dr. Chen is a great dentist and quite a perfectionist.) But after some consideration, we it was root canal time.

Drilling down, he found that the tooth was completely dead inside and had been for a very long time. When I got punched, #19 cracked down the center from front to back, which is why the crack didn't show on the x-ray. My dentist explained that when we are young, the body is very resilient. "Your tooth was broken, and your body created a seal around it. First the damage was contained and then the tooth died. It was still functional until getting this infection." I am convinced the infection happened now because at age 36 I finally have sufficient strength to allow this injury to see the light of day. The tooth had to be literally opened up and exposed in order to be repaired. So I have to open up too and acknowledge what happened. Christopher punched me in the face hard enough to break a tooth.

I learned that a root canal is a process and not a single procedure, so I was walking around for about a month with this old injury opened wide.  The dentist would check about once a week for whether the infection had cleared, each time putting some antibiotic powder into the drilled out tooth and covering it up with a bitter wax barrier.  Finally when the infection was gone, he sealed up the roots and the top of the tooth with care that the seal hold the two halves together. I’m almost grateful that I had to go around for a while, conscious of this opening, part of a history that needs to see the light of day in order to heal properly.  It’s still in question as to whether this tooth will last long enough to get a crown or whether it will eventually need to be extracted, but knock on wood, it’s doing pretty well right now.

When I told this story to my team at work, somebody asked light-heartedly if I was going to call my brother. I responded that he is in a residential mental institution. This is accurate but not a response to her question. The real response is that I won’t call because I no longer have a relationship with him. If he were out in the world today, I would similarly choose not to have any relationship with him, and in fact take measures to prevent him from getting my contact information. It was only when I was younger and living with my parents that I had no choice in the matter.  When I was in my early teens, him being institutionalized relieved me of the burden of having any relationship with my brother. I could attribute the lack of relationship to being institutionalized. But at this point it is my decision and I know it is the right one. I don’t need the mental institution as an excuse, and I don’t constantly worry about him potentially being released the way I did during his early years there.

My brother was hospitalized a number of times through out my childhood. Each time he was discharged from the mental hospital after a short stay, we didn’t talk about it.  He would be gone for maybe one or two weeks and my mom and dad and I acted as if nothing had happened when he got back.  I didn't get any explanation for why he was there and I didn't know what treatment he was getting and I didn't know what was expected to change as a result of the hospitalization. I heard terms like “brain damage, learning disability, manic depression.” Somehow I knew I wasn’t supposed to ask. There were always some topics that were taboo.

After these periodic hospitalizations, no one asked my brother what it was like and no one said welcome back. Nothing marked the event or encouraged any improvements in his mental health, nothing acknowledged what he experienced or ostensibly got out of the psychiatric care he was getting, nothing changed in anyone’s behavior or relationship to him. So surprise, his mental health did not improve. I only remember a sense of relief when he was gone. Years later, after he was gone and my mother was herself hospitalized for depression it was the same pattern again, no welcome home, nothing discussed.  But this time we met with the doctor and he said we should be “supportive.” I don’t think we knew what that word meant.  I was a teenager and honestly did not know what it looked, felt or smelled like to be supportive. I was literally puzzled over that word.

It’s not that I think talking about my brother or mom’s mental health would have made them better or would have made my life better. But I do believe banning talk of them made things worse. As a kid, I wanted to bring stuff up all the time but was threatened with trips to the psychiatrist myself whenever I tried. So I became very adverse to bringing up problems directly or asking for what I need in relationships, and this aversion kept me out of the psychiatrist’s office and kept me on the self-styled “sane” side of the family with my father.  This so-called sanity was characterized by silence, isolation and rugged individualism, all qualities associated with conventional masculinity. I became the strong/silent type, an unhealthy archetype if there ever was one.

The reluctance to speak came with me when I moved away from my parents.  And it became a strong contributing factor in two subsequent relational train wrecks: First when my ex-girlfriend brought a straight white monogamous male into our queer poly household and I did not take up the fact that his values and behavior were totally out of sync with the vision for our house. Second when she started to demonstrate values and behaviors herself that were in direct conflict with what was once our shared vision of queer utopian kindness, honesty and responsibility. Both times I waited until the situation was a total crisis to clearly and directly set limits and expectations for how I want my life to run, specifically for the way people can and cannot behave towards me. Since I grew up with somebody whose behavior was profoundly unacceptable, and my desire for things to be different was pathologized, it is no surprise that part of me believed I should just tough out other people’s mendacity. This undercurrent of silence is still present, but now a bigger and louder part of me is committed to dealing explicitly, even strategically, with the unacceptable shit in all areas of my life. Mendacity!

My brother was a minor the first time he was arrested.  He and my mom and I were eating at Burger King in the mall. The two of them were fighting and he flung everything off the table on to the floor and stormed out. I can't remember or imagine what I thought of the whole thing, but remembering this incident makes me also think about how the two of them fought constantly.  Something happened with the security guards and the police were called, the mall being outside the privacy of the patriarchal family home.  He spent the night in jail, and I don’t know exactly what happened but I know “resisting arrest” was one of the charges.  Within a few days he was briefly hospitalized and then released.

One event that stands out in my mind was a time he came home with broken glasses and a bloody broken nose. No explanation given. It turned out he had been to see a girl that night. What registered for me immediately was that a girl had prevailed in fight with him. Only on second thought did I consider the reason she resorted to hitting him that hard or more likely with some object. He often talked about what he wanted to do to girls. I cannot think of any other time in my life I have been so happy to see a person physically injured.

When my brother turned 18, my father kicked him out of the house.  My father had been very vocal about counting down the days and when it finally happened, I was so relieved. Shortly after my brother got his own place, he was arrested again.  He had some kind of fight with his landlady, a fight that resulted in her son calling the police on him. This time the court system did not release him and he was hospitalized instead. As far as I know, he has been diagnosed with schizophrenia. Eventually he went to the institution where he resides to this day.  I don't know the name of it and I have never visited him and I do not plan to visit him. For years I felt like I couldn't tell anyone about this decision because they would think I was heartless, or maybe because I believed that I was heartless. The broken tooth gave me a reason to look back through adult eyes and really understand for the first time the reasons for my decision to end my sibling relationship entirely.

 

Abigail Ottoman

Sloan: How old were you when you came out?

Abigail: I was always attracted to boys and girls, and for a while I thought everyone was like that. At eighteen, I knew I was queer, but I only came out to a few people. I had my first girlfriend at nineteen and came out to my family. It was horrible; my parents cornered me and asked me lots of questions. My mom was really disappointed and things were tense for a while, but she and I have continued discussing sexuality for the last fourteen years, and she’s come a long way. Now I take her to queer film screenings and Gay Pride.

SL: What was it like to be queer then?

AO: Since I was under 21, I wasn’t able to go to gay bars.  The only other way to meet queer people was through activism, so I joined this social/political group at the William Way center call Grass Roots Queers. The people were at least a few years older than I was, so, I didn’t really make friends but everyone was very caring toward me. I usually ended up collecting tickets and doing this and that at events. They wouldn’t let me drink at the parties, so I was very conscious that they saw me as a kid, but they were very supportive.  There wasn’t any way to look for people my age who were queer except at school, and I went to a commuter college in the suburbs that was pretty straight, though I did meet my first girlfriend there.

SL: Coming out and becoming an activist are almost inseparable experiences for me too.  Was there a gay student organization at your college? 

AO: There was a listing for a gay organization in the campus directory, but when I tried to find out about meetings, I found out it was inactive.

SL: It was the same at my college.  There would be a table set up for the gay group at campus events, but no one would stand behind it or even near it.  How did you go from being a young queer activist to being a professional dominatrix?

AO: I was looking for some kink and glamor. I did it because I felt like it, and had no idea that I would continue doing it for so many years. It just seemed like something fun to try.

“How did you get into this?” is something that everybody has asked- clients and acquaintances alike. I think the question is more interesting than the pat story I’ve told hundreds of times, so I’ll spare you. While everyone’s origin story is unique, there are basically two types of story: I took up sex work from a place of empowerment and curiosity or I took up sex work out of desperation and powerlessness. People want to know which category my story fits into so that they can either comfortably ask for titillating details or feel scandalized and superior. It isn’t a neutral question.

SL: Good point.  Tell me about your shows at Charlie’s Dream?

AO: Charlie’s Dream was a sex emporium, where you could buy movies, magazines, sex toys in the front, then in the back you could see girls in a peep show, and there was a bar with a stage for sex shows, and then there was a theater where we did our show on stage.  It was small stage with theater seating.

Our shows were very dramatic, each one had a very specific role play theme and yet usually ended the same way, with some sort of dildo action whether they began as I would be wearing a diaper being baby sat by a mean babysitter or I would be a patient in some sort of sex hospital or what have you.  Office and school scenes were my favorites.  It was me and another woman who is still in the business and we did our show on Saturday afternoons for about six months.  Our last show was a vampire theme.  We used red lights and I was covered in fake blood and I drank all these shots of vodka before the show.

SL: I loved Charlie’s Dream. I will never forget that place. I think it was kind of my dream too.  But while that show lasted 6 months or so, you spent years doing sessions with clients in various venues.   What is something you learned from this larger experience?

AO: One of the most important- and least talked about- parts of sex work is doing consultations with prospective clients. For me, it involved walking into a tiny consultation room, sitting down across from a complete stranger, and starting a conversation that was intimate yet professional. I had a few minutes to find out (or figure out) a client’s fantasy and immediately match his enthusiasm for it, while expressing professional competence, confidence, and sexiness in a way that was calculated to appeal to that particular client. Being able to communicate well by listening, making eye contact, asking questions, and smiling is more important than knowing intricate bondage or how to use every piece of equipment possible. Expertise is important for maintaining a regular clientele, but you have to have communication skills first and foremost.

SL: What was the work itself like for you?

AO: I did dirty things all day and intermittently hung out with a bunch of other women who were into hanging out and doing dirty things.

I was just thinking about this today-- I collaborated with people on creating situations in which they could focus solely on sexual pleasure. I got to be with so many different people while they were having an orgasm, which is a really special time to have with people. I didn’t have to deal with any other aspects of their lives or emotions, just their desire for and expression of pleasure.

I was very choosy about the kind of clients and sessions I wanted, and I was lucky enough to make enough money that way.  I preferred some clients to others and some activities to others, but I was very aware of that. I was lucky in that I was able to be choosy enough to tell clients that I didn’t think I was right for their fantasy if I didn’t want to do what they wanted. Of course, it wasn’t always so simple; sometimes I needed to take clients I didn’t like or connect with, but I was careful about making compromises I could live with, which I imagine is part of every job. I got to sit down with people and talk about how to create the most fulfilling hour of their day, and then carry out the plan. To spend my workday that way was amazing.

SL: What kinds of things happened in your sessions?

AO: Fetishes, fantasy role-play, bondage, dominance and submission, etc.  I did things that are as weird, disgusting, sadistic, and humiliating as anything you can think of, but I was always focused on honoring my clients’ wishes as respectfully as possible.  Sometimes it also meant doing very silly or vanilla activities.

There are so many ways to explain what professional BDSM is. People always want to know if it’s prostitution, and every dominatrix says no, but it’s actually a really challenging question. There’s a judicial checklist of financial and physical situations that in various combination are illegal, but the items on the list are extremely vague, so one session you might be doing something that is considered prostitution and the next you may merely be committing tax evasion.

I could give you a long list of alternately titillating and disgusting activities, but I’d rather say that I worked with clients on negotiating and fulfilling their (often secret) desires. Feeling pleasure may be easy, but expressing the truth about what you desire- talking about what you want, how you want it, and what kind of person you want it to be with, can be very difficult for people. We’re taught that a very narrow range of feelings, thoughts, sensations, and activities are acceptable. Everybody is turned on by something that others might find strange.

ACT UP NEW YORK: ACTIVISM, ART, AND THE AIDS CRISIS 1987-1993

The exhibition chronicles New York’s AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) through an examination of compelling graphics created by various artist collectives that populated the group, including Gran Fury, Silence=Death Project, Gang, and Fierce Pussy. The exhibition also features the premiere of the ACT UP Oral History Project, a suite of over 100 video interviews with surviving members of ACT UP New York that offer a retrospective portal on a decisive moment in the history of the gay rights movement, 20th-century visual art, our nation’s discussion of universal healthcare, and the continuing HIV/AIDS epidemic. The exhibition ACT UP New York provides an opportunity to reinvigorate a debate around the realities of HIV/AIDS today, and about the links between visual art, political activism, health, and human rights.

In October I went to Cambridge and saw the unprecedented exhibition ACT UP NEW YORK: ACTIVISM, ART, AND THE AIDS CRISIS 1987-1993.   I took a lot of pictures in order to include them here as a treat for friends who are too far away or otherwise unable to make the trip.  I feel so grateful that I was able to visit and fortunate to know both co-directors of the ACT UP Oral History Project through my involvement with MIX NYC.  I am not sure that I would have been aware of the exhibit otherwise.

On the way to Cambridge I was thinking back to the time I called in to the Brian Lehrer radio show and talked to the woman who screened the calls that day, World AIDS Day.  I was not on the air, but I was telling her that Brian Lehrer has been talking for 20 minutes about whether or not the “stigma of AIDS” has decreased without once mentioning homophobia, without naming the fact that Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome was originally called Gay Related Immune Deficiency.  I was literally choking on the words, saying this was all wrong, historically inaccurate, an inexcusable omission.  Where else do we think that stigma came from?  She said she would let Brian know.  I am no expert on this history but at least I know what I remember...

A central theme of the exhibition is the intersection of art and activism, and much of the exhibit amounts to an archive of visual activism and oral history.  The exhibit spans two separate galleries. The first gallery contains the ACT UP Oral History Project and some large-scale visual art, including a fabulously wheat pasted women’s bathroom by Fierce Pussy.  The upstairs gallery has a timeline of milestones, films installed on a loop with a single bench to sit and watch, and a display of posters and stickers.  There are also some prints of the original posters available for visitors.  The film installation includes work by DIVA TV (Damned Interfering Video Activists) and United in Anger: A History of ACT UP by Jim Hubbard, co-founder of both MIX NYC and the ACT UP Oral History Project.

Upstairs, I got totally caught up in the film installation and found myself watching it in its entirety.  One of the films included an expose on the biased media coverage of the 1989 ACT UP and WHAM! (Women’s Health Action and Mobilization) Stop the Church action at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Watching this transported me back in time.  It made me realize that even within the incredibly homophobic coverage of the action, enough truth squeaked through to have a powerful impact on my life’s direction.  This is no overstatement.  I was a kid and learned about the die-in from TV, but even with this very condemning media coverage I still identified with the protesters.  At 15 in my parent’s house, I came to life for that brief footage. It was one of those pivotal life moments.  

At the exhibit here in the present, I learned that the media got this footage from a participating activist, edited the hell out of it and excised reproductive freedom entirely from their coverage.  But even in that limited, incomplete footage, I had seen my queer future, and shivered in my suburban closet.  Through the haze of media disapproval and selective reporting, I saw not only the commitment and integrity of the protesters but also what they were up against.  I was an angry teenage girl seeing people stand up to those sexist old fucks in the church, confronting Cardinal O’Connor as nothing more than a creepy old man who had so much say over the stories we tell ourselves about sex.  He had so much say over what little conversation there was about HIV/AIDS.  Seeing Cardinal O’Connor step over bodies was the perfect non-metaphor for what was happening.  This action was more than symbolic, it was literally true.

For context, three years prior to the Stop the Church action, Cardinal Ratzinger wrote: “When civil legislation is introduced to protect behavior to which no one has any conceivable right, neither the Church nor society at large should be surprised when other distorted notions and practices gain ground, and irrational and violent reactions increase.”  I heard a portion of that statement in one of the videos, and I felt compelled to track down the exact quote and read it a couple times in an effort to understand the depth of the immorality we were and are up against. 

A time line covers a full wall in the upstairs gallery.  Reading it filled in some gaps in my memory and many more gaps in what I even knew about in the first place.  This history is hardly collected anywhere and certainly not taught to anyone.  Seeing the time line was more than informative, it was powerful.  One of many new things I learned was how in 1992, ACT UP held a political funeral in DC and a procession of 11 people scattered the ashes of their loved ones on the White House lawn.  This event was noted on the wall and there was film footage too, and it really blew me away.  I have been trying unsuccessfully to think of a comparable moment in history.  The only image that comes to my mind is the Memphis sanitation worker strike where some carried signs that read "I am a man."  In both cases people were demanding their humanity be recognized and thereby confronting the deepest roots of the specific injustice at hand.

1981

1991

I watched some footage of a group decision-making process in the midst of an action. A group of protesters at City Hall was trying to come to consensus about whether or not to block traffic to the Brooklyn Bridge.  Some were ready to go, others wanted to wait for more media to arrive to maximize coverage.  Showing even such a minor disagreement is critical to preserving a real history.  There was also some footage of non-violent civil disobedience training.  It was great to see this collaboration documented, to keep away the mythologizing of spontaneous demonstration when there is so much planning, training, debate, and plain old hard work that goes in to making art, protests and demonstrations.

Downstairs, the ACT UP Oral History Project is set up with 14 monitors each displaying a different set of full-length interviews for a total of 102 interviews, many over an hour long.  Each monitor is set up with 2 pairs of headphones and two seats.  The arrangement lends itself to listening with a friend.  The set-up itself seems to request that you share the interview and enter into a conversation, rather than passively listening or keeping what you hear to yourself.  It suggests not only learning but also engagement.

The interviews contain personal stories and the larger story of collective action making a difference.  In one interview I was watching, the person being interviewed recalls a specific action at a Republican fund raiser.   Off-screen interviewer Sarah Schulman, co-founder of both MIX NYC and the ACT UP Oral History Project, asks questions like, "Who else was there, what were their names?"  With this line of questioning, we are hearing not only one individual’s history but also learning our shared history, who we lost, what they did, what ideas they had, what art they made.  And we witness their grief.

The oral histories are now available to students to use in their research projects and available for scholarly study through Harvard University.  And I have some hope that the attention of this particular school has the potential to act as an intervention into academic amnesia about the HIV/AIDS crisis, or maybe even staunch the flow of our history from being drained away by the likes of national public radio.  Maybe amnesia is not the right word, it is more deliberate ignorance of both recent history and the current crisis.   The preservation of these oral histories is in direct defiance of the way our lives and realities are so often ignored. In this way, it seems to be a direct continuation of the work of ACT UP in demanding to be seen, acknowledged and recognized as people.

The protest posters and other art in the exhibit detail a clear connection between healthcare, AIDS activism and reproductive freedom.  The connection is rarely made explicit today, so it was very refreshing to see it plainly demonstrated that when the state attempts to control our sexuality through the restriction of any form of healthcare or information related to sex, we are NOT free.  One of my favorite aspects of the politics represented here is the refusal to compromise on how everything is connected to everything else.  The fact that so much of the art was created by collectives speaks to this sense of connection.  In many different ways the artists and activists declare that our lives, our bodies and our sexuality are deserving of respect, honor and care.  Not just some of us, not just the wealthy ones, not just the monogamous couples, not just those of us with kids.  This message of connection and inclusion could not be more relevant to the current healthcare legislation that would exclude funding for abortion. 

In the words of Gran Fury, “Corporate Greed, Government Inaction, and Public Indifference make AIDS a political crisis.”  ACT UP could have taken up any one of these strands to fight against, but chose to go after all of them and more, all the while exposing the racism, sexism and homophobia at the center of the crisis.  All the art and documentation in this exhibit points to the possibility of working on the details and the big picture all at the same time.  The group affected changes in both the law and the culture.  I was really struck by how the activists could see and define the roots of a crisis in real time, right as it was unfolding.  ACT UP took on not only the church, not only the government, not only the pharmaceutical industry, but also the belief systems in our culture that perpetuate and permit the deaths of huge numbers of people at the so-called margins.  All these documents, posters, interviews and stickers comprise a legacy, a legacy of values like responsibility, loyalty and commitment.


The feeling I took away from the exhibit was nothing less than a moral obligation to continue to work in the same way, by identifying the root causes of injustice and going after them while at the same time not losing track of the real world details that need to be addressed on a daily basis.  The feeling mirrored the time I saw the Stop the Church action on the evening news 20 years ago, but this time there was also a rare sense of external recognition of my cultural identity as queer person.  The disapproving lens was gone, temporarily lifted to reveal a space full of visible, audible expressions of who we are, what we do and how we love.  The exhibit provides a mirror where we actually show up as a community with some shared values and shared history, demanding to be fully recognized as human beings without any qualifications, without trotting out today's tired argument that we are fully human because of how similar we are to straight people, because we have jobs and go shopping, etc.  No "because" at all.  Just respect.

Catholics

Why is it that whenever I talk to straight people about my opposition to marriage, I always find myself reassuring them that I am not judging their marriage or their choices?  They never feel the need to reassure me that they are not judging me when they talk about marriage or discuss who is engaged or any of the other choices they know very well I have consciously and deliberately ruled out of my life.  Straight privilege means never noticing that these conversations silence queerness by drowning it out with repetitive straight clichés.  

When a straight person tells me “I am a catholic,” it never occurs to them to reassure me that they disagree with their church’s views about sexuality or contraception or abortion or any of the other things I feel strongly about.  It never occurs to them to point out that they do not stand by the pope’s views about homosexuality.  It never occurs to them to point out that they do not stand by the church’s destruction of ancient and irretrievable books, its inquisitions, its crusades, its complicity with the holocaust and ongoing complicity with the AIDS crisis.  We are talking about the people who created the witch hunt, after all, why not at least pay lip service to this two thousand year abuse of power?  How much does an indulgence run these days, anyway? 

Yet when I say that I am opposed to marriage, I always find myself offering some comforting words to them so they know I am not opposed to their marriage.  I care about their feelings and our relationship.  I guess I am prioritizing the relationship over my ideas, which has its pro’s and con’s, but clearly the caring is not reciprocated.  Part of straight privilege is being comfortably certain that you will rarely be called upon to explain your relationship choices, or consider how your words, actions, beliefs, values and omissions might be painful for others. 

So the catholics now have a pope who has been a fanatical opponent of queer people since he was in the seminary.  We are Ratzinger’s favorite topic going way back in his hate-fueled career. This is the same guy who was protested by Queer Nation in NYC back in the late 80s.  He said in his 2008 year-end remarks that humanity needs protecting from the threats of homosexuality, transexuality and gender theory as much as the environment needs protection from destruction. It made me wonder who he is referring to with the word “humanity.”  In more than 20 years, this man has not moved an inch in his hatred and condemnation of queers.  Is the pope’s humanity the same humanity that led the Vatican to refuse to sign on to a UN proposal for nations around the world to decriminalize homosexuality?  Ratzinger extends open arms to a holocaust denier but looks the other way at state sponsored murder of homosexuals.  In Iran, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, United Arab Emirates, Sudan, Nigeria and Mauritania, homosexuality is punishable by death.  The catholic church has made it very clear that for the Vatican, condoning the actions of states that put homosexuals to death is preferable to signing on to legislation that would suggest condoning homosexuality. People are being punished and even put to death, but they won’t sign on to a resolution to stop the killing because that would also marginally condone homosexuality.  How dense do you need to be to continue to be a part of a church that calls itself pro-life yet holds this untenable position? 

Humanity looks quite different to me than it does to this pope.  Clearly, my personal humanity and the humanity of my kind is not in need of protection in the eyes of Ratzinger.   It sucks to realize you have a more expansive view of humanity than this little old turd who gets to be a world leader.  The humanity of four trans women who were murdered in Memphis, Tennessee over the course of 2008 is the kind of humanity I find deserving of protection.  The pope missed this fact in his year-end reflection.  One of the women, Duanna Johnson, was beaten by police officers in June, was planning a lawsuit against the city, and was mysteriously found dead in November. So where exactly does the threat of transgenderism show up?  What threat did these women pose to humanity?  The question I continue to ask myself is:  When do I start holding the catholics in my life accountable for the position of their pope and church?  When will I start to ask the catholics I know to have some integrity?  Identifying oneself with catholicism is not a neutral position any more than identifying with a political party, and a very mean-spirited and vicious one at that. Either stand up to this fuck or leave his church.  Whose humanity really needs protecting here?