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.

National Equality March

During the 1993 gay March on Washington, I was just finishing high school and knew I was queer but was years away from coming out. My history class had a trip to DC immediately after the march and I remember stealing furtive glances at all the queers who were still lingering around town. My class went to observe congress and I set off the metal detector with my steel toe boots. Jesse Helms was on the floor of the Senate and I already despised him, for his contempt for people with AIDS and for generally being a racist shit. At the time, it seemed like more than half of everything in the media about queer people were quotes from Jesse Helms, railing against Robert Mapplethorpe and fighting against funding for AIDS research. Those are the two things I remember from my high school class trip to DC, Jesse Helms and homos.

When the 2000 March came around, I was out of the closet and living in a queer household in Philly, preparing to move to NYC with my two girlfriends. The “Millennium March” was organized top-down by the conservative and assimilationist Human Rights Campaign. It was lacking a clear political agenda and had corporate sponsors out the ass. Notice how even the name “Millennium March” describes neither the people marching nor the reason for the march. The main event was a huge concert to raise money for HRC. There was no question in my mind that I would not be in attendance. I wrote and circulated a zine criticizing the whole thing as a distraction from our real movement, our local work, and the connections and intersections between queers and other marginalized people.

And now 2009, another gay Equality March on DC. HRC was just one of many participating group this year, so I briefly considered going. I even felt kind of guilty about not going. Maybe I missed something historic. From what I read in advance about the National Equality March there was a lot going on and even though HRC was present, lots of smaller groups were also hosting workshops and many individuals were scheduled to speak. The platform included multiple issues, and activists I respect were involved. So I felt favorably about the March, at least more than I had in 2000. Maybe it would have been inspirational and refreshing to see committed activists from around the country.

Then I saw seven pictures from the March featured in the NY Times. Two of them really hit me hard. The first shows marchers with home made signs bearing the message: “Just like you! Equality Now!” This depresses me because sameness should never be the qualifying factor for being considered equal. Equal does not mean identical. “We worship and parent. Just like you!” What if we don’t? I do not worship and I do not parent. “Just like you” is an inherently unfair and dehumanizing measure, like “normal” or “regular.” And who exactly is the “you” here? The “you” is some imaginary idealized person living in a fictional family structure that is a reality for only a tiny minority of people in this country, gay, straight or otherwise. The “you” is some person who only exists on TV, but hardly even there anymore. Liberals talk about valuing diversity, a word boils that down to diverse, as in diverge, as in differ, as in different as in NOT just like you. Respect for differences... A revised sign: Nothing like you! Equality now!

A second picture from the NY Times featured a guy with a sign that read “Obama- Where’s MY change?” This guy snapped me out of my anger at the people in the pictures and made me realize I was actually angry at the newspaper itself. The Times must have been searching for the single most asinine message at the March. When they found this guy, they took his picture and featured it as one of just seven images selected to represent the day. The Times has an enormous power in choosing which images are seen and thereby influencing how we are represented and perceived. They first chose a message of assimilation and followed it with a message of self-centered entitlement. The accompanying article was no better, quoting a few folks from the crowd, failing to mention the many workshops, caucuses and speakers at the event. I was taken in at first, falling into my routine critique of the mainstream LGBT movement for aiming low, for mistaking marriage for progress, for being exclusionary, self-centered, entitled.... Until I saw this picture and became severely pissed off by the media representation of my people! This time I am not buying it, I do not believe the closeted/apologist “Just like you” and I do not believe the narcissist “Where’s My Change” dude. Sure these folks are real, but the NY Times trivializes our larger struggle by spotlighting only the most superficial messages. The editors show queers their opinion of us through what they select and what they exclude from being fit to print, and we should hold them accountable for the absence of substance in their coverage of our movement.

Imagine that the Times had quoted Urvashi Vaid’s speech as the message of the March.Imagine that instead of the where’s-my-change guy, the Times used Urvashi’s words to represent us. Here is the movement I know and love: “I'm not just here to stand up as a lesbian. I'm here as a woman. I'm here as an immigrant. I'm here against racism. I'm here for health care for all. I'm here for freedom of expression. I'm here to change the status quo."