Joy

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Four Vision Quests of Jesus (2015)

  Native Christian theology offers us a radical sense of community. The vision of the mountain reminds Jesus that just as no one can be on “top,” no one can be on the “bottom” either. In his vision there is no vertical caste system for human beings. Though we may have very different gifts and very different abilities, we are all members of a single sacred family that stretches out horizontally to incorporate all persons without exception. We are a spirit family. We include our ancestors. We include clans of creatures whose presence on Earth is just as important as our own. Only God stands apart. The Creator is at the center of all life, the One being around whom we all revolve in an attitude of joy and thanksgiving. When the Native Messiah completed his first vision quest, he returned to be greeted by his friends. In this case, his spirit friends. Matthew’s narrative calls these beings “angels.” Native tradition would call them “spirits.” They are at the end of the story to symbolize that the person on the quest goes out from community and always returns to community. There is no real break in the relationship with the tribe of the human beings. Matthew, therefore, offers a description of the first vision quest of Jesus that can be read as an expression of the most fundamental values and teachings in the Native Covenant. This vision quest announces the Good Medicine of Jesus as being deeply grounded in Native American religious tradition. Jesus embodies a Native concept of messiahship because he confirms the cardinal principles of Native tradition. In his vision, he supports the primacy of God, the centrality of the “we” over the “I,” the egalitarian nature of sacred community. Jesus rejects the rugged individualism that inflates the human ego and leads to the exploitation of greed. He stands against those temptations that are truly devilish in every human heart, the lure of ego and profit. As the Native Messiah, Jesus embodies every virtue of the Native tradition while preparing himself to contest those forces that may try to subvert the People. He returns from his wilderness experience even more connected to the Native family. His vision is so powerful that he cannot be seen in the crowd. He is truly one with the many. When my ancestors buried their loved ones in a common grave, when they carried their bones on the long walk into the wilderness, they were on a vision quest with Jesus. They were announcing that what holds us together as human beings, what unites us to all of God’s holy creation, must be the primary vision of our collective lives. My Choctaw relatives, along with those of so many other Native nations, were making their witness to God. Even during the nightmare and trauma of Removal, of the Trail of Tears, they kept their vision clear.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  It is of all the festivals the one most thoroughly interwoven with the popular and family life, and stands at the head of the great feasts in the Western church year. It continues to be, in the entire Catholic world and in the greater part of Protestant Christendom, the grand jubilee of children, on which innumerable gifts celebrate the infinite love of God in the gift of his only-begotten Son. It kindles in mid-winter a holy fire of love and gratitude, and preaches in the longest night the rising of the Sun of life and the glory of the Lord. It denotes the advent of the true golden age, of the freedom and equality of all the redeemed before God and in God. No one can measure the joy and blessing which from year to year flow forth upon all ages of life from the contemplation of the holy child Jesus in his heavenly innocence and divine humility. Notwithstanding this deep significance and wide popularity, the festival of the birth of the Lord is of comparatively late institution. This may doubtless be accounted for in the following manner: In the first place, no corresponding festival was presented by the Old Testament, as in the case of Easter and Pentecost. In the second place, the day and month of the birth of Christ are nowhere stated in the gospel history, and cannot be certainly determined. Again: the church lingered first of all about the death and resurrection of Christ, the completed fact of redemption, and made this the centre of the weekly worship

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  Fiona spotted Corinne and Fernand in the center of the room, holding court. Their picture was being taken. Claire was still at the mouth; Fiona would give her space. She was increasingly reassured that Claire wouldn’t flee the gallery. This work was much more postmodern, much more multimedia—Fiona wished she had the vocabulary for it—than anything she’d seen from Richard before. A large photo showed a Polaroid sitting on a stack of papers. The Polaroid, in turn, was of a man in a chair, his face in his hands. It looked like the ’80s or early ’90s—something about his white T-shirt, his Docksiders—but Fiona didn’t recognize him. Next to it hung a photo of an apartment building’s facade, three of the windows painted over with red X’s. According to the sign, Richard had taken the photo in 1982 but added the X’s just this year. She supposed that the show’s title, Strata, was about this layering of old and new. She found the updated Julian series—the 2015 Julian smiling mischievously. But no face in a Richard Campo photo ever showed just a single emotion. He also looked embarrassed, and also triumphant. She almost collided with Jake Austen. He said, “There’s my girl!” She patted his chest. “I am not your girl, Jake. But it’s good to see you.” It was, really. She’d had the feeling for the past ten minutes that she didn’t know what the hell year it was—the year of Nora’s show, the year Julian vanished, the year she first took Claire to the Brigg, the year Claire was born— and here was a living, breathing reminder that it was 2015. He said, “Check it out! From the movie.” He pointed across the gallery to where that actor stood, the one someone on the street had called Dermott McDermott. But no one was looking at him; everyone was looking at Richard, who had just entered the room. Slim gray slacks, a coral shirt open at the neck, his cheeks glowing with attention. Her famous friend. How bizarre life was. — By the time Fiona made her way around the sectional wall, Jake was off toasting with some loud young Brits, and Julian had circled back. He said, “Is everything okay with your daughter?” “Lord only knows.” “It’ll be okay. I can tell it will. I know these things. And my God, she’s just like you.” Fiona laughed. “She’s nothing like me. That’s the problem.” “Are you kidding? Don’t you remember yourself? You were the most bullheaded little—you were practically feral! Remember when you told your parents you’d climb in the coffin if we couldn’t all come to Nico’s vigil?” “There was no coffin. I said I’d stand up and tell everyone.” “Okay. But you see my point.” “That was the only way I could survive.” Julian smiled. “It’s not a bad way to be. Hey, are you really moving here?” “I actually think so, yes.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Your ama is baiting us, Ben said. She’s getting ready to bury someone. I said that the holes would tell me what to do, that they were already sirening, an orchestra of mouths warning me. The only time the holes were coherent was when Ben and I touched. When we kissed in front of them, they cinched their lips and listened, opening only to say yes, yes. While night erected itself around us like a tent, we sat cross-legged on the soil and its tapestry of worms. Ben laced her legs around my waist. Her mouth so close I could see the serrations of her teeth, sawing every sound in half so that I heard it twice: my name, my name. I leaned forward, flicked her upper lip with my bottom one. We met inside our mouths. I found the seam under her tongue and undid it. With my hands around her, I felt her spine through her shirt, a ladder to thirst. All around us, the holes were full of a bright sound, jingling like a handful of nickels. My tongue slipped into her nostril and a pebble of dried mucus dissolved on my tongue. I knew everything she’d smelled that day: sweat, the soil, me. Ben knelt and kissed my knees. She pulled my pants down as I lay back, soil gathering between the halves of my ass. My hip-bone fit in the bowl of her palm and shone. I sat up and worked her jeans down to her ankles, the waistband of her underwear biting my finger blue. When I bent my head to kiss where the elastic striped her skin, she reached down and nested her fingers in my hair. I wondered if it was possible for a tongue to turn into a fish and swim into the dark of someone, disappearing forever into that ecology of need. Ben gripped my hair, tugged me closer until my face was not my face but a place where she beached, where salt scoured my mouth of its name. I was dew-hungry. I was the sound she made grinding against my chin-bone, the holes rioting beside us, brimming with spit. The moon newly minted in the heat and pressure of our pressed-together bodies. Later, when both of us stood in front of the bathroom mirror, we looked like we were wearing our graves, dazzling with dirt, musky with the soil we’d turned on its back. Overnight, the holes contracted into nostril-holes, breathing out a fog that was thick as whisked egg, a fog that would fly far northwest to squat on top of the Bay Bridge. The fog smelled like fucking, like us, like our sweat fermented into sweet pudding, and when it began to rise, we found the last letter sprouting out of the 口’s lips. It parted the fog, flapping like a sail in trouble, no destination visible, and through the curdled milk of the air I could only see Ben bending down to save it.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Sounds like your ancestors had a foot fetish, Ben said. I laughed and called her a birdshit, shouldering her off the toilet seat until she stumbled in, displacing water in arcs. She climbed out of the toilet bowl, walking out of the stall and shimmying her legs to dry them. When I called her back into the stall, hopping down from the toilet seat to say sorry, she smiled and said, Watch me, dipping both her hands into the toilet bowl and flinging fistfuls of gem-hard drops at me. Turning my face away, I gripped the wall and laughed, wiping my cheeks with my sleeve. Surrender, she said, as the toilet bowl boiled over with our laughter. _ On the next show-and-tell day, Ben brought a birdcage to class and posed it in the center of her desk until our teacher, a bleached-out woman with freckled legs, told Ben to put it away. To the back of the classroom, she said. Don’t distract the other students. But Ben was the distraction: She sat behind me, fiddling with her lips as if she couldn’t figure out how to unbutton them. Her hair knotted itself to any object within reach: the chair, her pencil, my hands. When it was her turn to show and tell, Ben carried the cage from the back of the classroom, holding it high over her head as if she were going to crown herself with it. The cage was rusted and doorless, but its damage made it dearer to her. She said it had been owned by her great-grandmother, born a beast-keeper of the royal zoo, so skilled at taming animals that she could make a giraffe bow down and lick her eyelids. Since then, every daughter in the family was born with a key growing in her mouth like a milk tooth. Ben’s great-grandmother wore keys everywhere on her body: dangling from her ears, sheathed in her nostrils, darned to her skirt. In the royal zoo, there were millions of cages with one bird each, southern seabirds with glass beaks, desert birds with two sets of eyelids, a thousand breeds of songless sparrows. One summer, the animals remembered their past lives and began to behave outside of their assigned species. The royal fish tried walking out of their rivers and died writhing in the mud. The dogs teethed off their tails and jumped from roofs, believing themselves winged. The snakes forgot they were cold-blooded and stayed in the shade until their blood iced over. The canaries plucked themselves bald and converted to carnivores. Ben’s great-grandmother was accused of poisoning the animals, of surgically swapping their minds. As punishment, each of her limbs was tied to a different horse, tearing her apart when they ran. The soldiers collected her limbs in a sack, but when they tried to toss it into a nearby river, the sack began to shiver.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  It is still a rare thing for most of us to sit with what we feel, how we feel, the reality that we carry memories and feelings from what our ancestors experienced, and that we carry our current continuous collective trauma together. The pain can open to other feelings, more nuanced and clear. It can begin to make authentic connection and collectivity more possible. Every mass movement, every collective effort, is made up of relationships that exist between members of the larger group. Around friends old and new, somatics helped me begin to gauge what I truly wanted and needed from connections, from political space. I got clearer on what I could offer. I got in touch with a feeling of restlessness and wandering that let me know when I didn’t want to be somewhere or with someone or with a political project. I could also feel the distinct energy of moving toward, or forward, that let me know when I did want to be around someone, did want to join in an effort from a place of authentic alignment, rather than obligation. This awareness extended until I could begin to feel when I wanted to be in a certain place, job, political project, or even city. And when it was time to go. Yes is an embodiment. Yes is a future. In physical connections, I was able to stay more present.77 I learned that I had a no, a visceral, clear “hell no.” If I listened to the no, if I honored it and set boundaries, it made more room for my yes. And the beautiful, miraculous new possibility is: I am able to stay present in my yes. I can feel the yes in person, I can feel it at a distance. I can feel my face flush, my heart pound, a smile I can’t swallow. I can feel my body get wet and warm, open. I can feel myself move toward an idea, a longing, a vision. I am a whole system; we are whole systems. We are not just our pains, not just our fears, and not just our thoughts. We are entire systems wired for pleasure, and we can learn how to say yes from the inside out. For me, from that yes, I am learning to communicate in real time, both what I want and what I don’t want. To be with the twisting gut and pounding heart that don’t want to speak uncomfortable truths, the burrowing, masking tucked chin of shame, the circular, overthinking busyness of my brain, and with the deep breath and interconnected dignity that allow me to be more honest every day. To be with the tingling spine and warm solar plexus that hint that I am feeling love. To pull in my energy when I am in a situation where I need better boundaries. And to keep bringing my attention back to center, back to the present moment, to show up where I am.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  I met Alta Starr and Idelisse Malave when they were at the Ford Foundation and Tides Foundation, respectively, so I initially knew them as funders who were working to shift the relationship between movements and philanthropy. Once they left those jobs, I was excited to discover that Alta was a gifted poet and Idelisse an incredible visual artist. Both have gone on to do organizational development and coaching work in addition to their creative work. They are both committed to lives of pleasure and have taught me a lot about pleasure as we age. amb. Hello, my loves. I imagine us sitting together at a dining room table. On the table, there is a bottle of good red wine and a bottle of Macallan 18 Year. And maybe an elegant vaporizer with some OG Kush for me. It’s sunset, we have a view over Harlem, and I am so excited to have this time with you. First, what is your choice from the gifts on the table? And how did you learn to love that particular delight? Ide. The good red wine! Definitely an acquired taste, and now a luscious pleasure. The first time I tasted wine was when I was nine and playing at a friend’s house. It was some Jewish holiday, and her parents had Manischewitz. Looked like grape juice to us, and we helped ourselves. Certainly as sweet as Welch’s. No wonder I had to acquire a taste for the “real” stuff. Alta. The sunset. Your faces. Your eyes. Nature—trees, sunrises and sunsets, animals—has always opened my heart and made me feel good. And feeling good makes me feel affectionate and see and feel the expression of life, in those I’m with, especially when we got that soul-kindred thing working. amb. Okay, good. Enjoy. Now can you each tell me what feels most important for people to know about who you are? Alta. One of my teachers in grad school called me a “disciple of joy.” For the purposes of this conversation, that’s enough. Ide. Perfect, Alta! Then, I’m a joyful old bitch committed to being fully herself. amb. What has been the greatest pleasure of your life?

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Within movement there are significant small pleasures too. I have been facilitating Black liberation work a lot more in the past few years, and one group has developed a practice of celebrating a decision with music—actually putting on a nineties R&B song and singing it together all the way through to cement the decision in our bodies and cells. It makes me thrill when it’s time for a decision, to feel our aliveness and laughter and nostalgia and power. The work should, as often as possible given the obstacles we’re facing, be a pleasure. I am completing this book in the spot in my house where I meditate, an old couch at the foot of my bed. Out the window is a defunct streetlight, a grassy concrete lot, some nondescript square buildings in the housing complex next door, and snippets of Detroit’s skyline. I feel the pleasure of attention liberation as I sit here. The early morning sounds and sights of the city flow by, but louder than that are the birds who are my closest neighbors. They gather on the lightpost and the mysterious wires slung from here to there, sometimes singular, sometimes as a flock landing at the same time. They are loud in the morning, wild. There are two black squirrels who scurry along the thicker lines, and the birds float up to let them pass, then return, settling feathers, chattering, busy. In the time of writing this book, my mind has often been as busy as these birds—I have navigated the scarcity that comes with being punished by the IRS, wondered how I was going to pay my rent, get groceries, travel outside of work. I have been working on old, deep trauma that doesn’t even have a language yet. I have wrestled with body image and weight gain. I have fallen near and far and out of and again into love. I have cursed cancer and grieved for strangers and friends. I have danced with my depression in the face of personal and global apocalypse. I have wondered how committed I can be to a nation that never planned for me to be more than a slave. I have felt movements fracture and tremble under the pressures of this time. And I have felt more joy, connection, satisfaction—more pleasure—during this time than any other in my life.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  I started this blog the night Beyoncé’s self-titled album came out.2 I didn’t know her album was coming, and Beyoncé didn’t know she was unleashing a soundtrack to this moment of my life. That convergence was so special that I had to pause writing this and spend two months learning the “Flawless” dance and wondering, among other things, exactly what kind of feminism I am interested in. I decided that I am interested in a sexual, complex, whole person, imperfect feminism, one full of mothers, single people, married people, and poly people, sex workers. Women who make quality work and create systems to liberate their creativity. Women as powerful as Tina Turner and other survivors of domestic violence. Women who like to submit, talk dirty, shock even themselves. Women who like to dominate, operate outside of gender norms, women willing to disagree and sit in discomfort and hold their power and their ground, women willing to grow and learn in public. It is in that spirit that I return to this blog entry. Here goes: I don’t talk about sex enough here! Anyone who knows me in real life knows that the sensual, sexual, erotic perspective is a primary lens through which I see the world. Yet I struggle with how to integrate that self with the one here who speaks about transformation, babies, grief, growth. But the link is all in the body as a practice ground for transformation.3 I had a dream the other night. I boarded a train for a cross-country journey with my friend Evans, which is important only because he is a sexy beast. I was quickly recruited for a burlesque show, and I auditioned in a clear plastic belt and little else. The person running the auditions said, “To do this job you have to l.o.v.e. love your body!” And I responded, “Oh, I do. I do love my body. I love my body!” I woke up murmuring this to myself. (Note: can you see how the lyrics “I woke up like this: flawless” struck me with joy?) Now, that’s an awesome dream outside of any analysis. But it is particularly awesome when you understand that my focus for personal transformation for the last few years (roughly thirty-plus years or so) has been learning to love my body or, more precisely, falling in love with myself through the terrain of my body. This dream made me feel that my focus is restructuring and healing me at the level of my subconscious … if I understand anything about the mysterious realm of dreams.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  It turns out, being present is the most important part of every single experience in my life. It turns out, every other human being is also wired in these ways, entire systems shaped by pain and pleasure. And I can grant others the same autonomy I am learning to wield on my own behalf—how I spend my life is my decision, based on all kinds of data coming from my body. And I can grant others the same level of complexity and contradiction as I am learning to embody—we are all multitudes in process. We get to have boundaries. We get to have longings and articulate them. We can begin to imagine a society coordinated around honest, clearly articulated longings. At the end of the Somatics and Trauma course, I was invited into teacher training, to become part of the community that brings embodiment to new students, new geographies, and social movements. I have been learning and teaching for eight years as of the writing of this book. Last year we brought the course to Detroit for the first time, and it was an incredible experience to share this liberation technology with a place that has given me so much, with people I love and am growing with. It was also thrilling to grow skills with Detroit and midwestern and southern organizers who often get overlooked by efforts based in New York City or the Bay. I can already feel the impact in the community of having more organizers who can feel themselves, who have been practicing returning to center and moving toward longing, all of us organizing ourselves around what we long for rather than what we are against. I believe somatics, in coursework and/or bodywork, is one of the most effective ways to get a group of complex, contradictory humans into alignment with a liberated collective future. Seeing, feeling ourselves, as we are, with agency to shape the future … that’s the miracle. 76 “What Is Somatics?,” Generative Somatics, http://www.generativesomatics.org/content/what-somatics.77 It was much later that I read the book Healing Sex, written by one of my somatics teachers, Staci Haines. It’s really helpful and has all this homework for the reader to do, to learn your landscape of sexual trauma, to move toward healing. I highly recommend it. See Staci Haines, Healing Sex: A Mind-Body Approach to Healing Sexual Trauma (San Francisco: Cleis Press, 2007).Black Woman WildnessA Spell Junauda Petrus Junauda Petrus is a soul sweetener, filmmaker, writer, runaway witch, cosmic bag lady, and cofounder at Free Black Dirt. [image file=image_rsrc3KV.jpg] Some summers ago, I was going through a hard and breathtaking breakup. The kind where I was carrying on crying, listening to Bilal on repeat, puffing all the trees. The fatigue of sadness left me an emo hermit in fetal position in my bed. It was my first relationship with a woman after coming out to myself fully in my early thirties, and my nose may have been a little wide open. Just a little.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Ide. So many pleasures. Questions about the “greatest” or “number one favorite” always stymie me because you can—and do—have the chance at more than just one. But, I’ll play—sort of. I’m torn between “loving” and “seeing.” Loving—children, parents, lovers, friends. The feeling of deep connection and warmth for another person, the energy it releases in your body, mind, and soul, the way it takes you over. The other pleasure vying for the number one spot is “seeing.” The delights of just absorbing something or someone with your eyes, of knowing it or them in that way. You can be going about your business, not really noticing much around you, and then, suddenly, you really see, pause, really look and take it in. It’s why I love the visual arts and to paint and draw—trying to capture that experience of delight in being fully present. Now that I think of it, both loving and seeing are about connecting and transcending—your boundaries blur, and you’re part of something bigger than just yourself. So maybe the greatest pleasure is transcendence. Hmm. Was I supposed to talk about sex? Sex is also transcending, right? Alta. The greatest pleasure in my life has been discovering, or rediscovering, that life itself is made out of pleasure. I want to be clear that I don’t mean that everything that happens in life is pleasurable. If only! But rather, the very fact that we experience life, that there is this steady hum or pulse of livingness and awareness with only one purpose, living more, reaching greedily for more life—connecting to that and feeling it is pure pleasure for me. Feeling my livingness and the sweet pure livingness of others—my loved ones, trees, my dog, the ocean—catching and surrendering to the heartbeat and pulse of life, in all its varied melodies. Yes, pleasure is a physical, erotic, heart-filling, and spiritual thing for me. At its most mundane edge, maybe I’d call it delight. Feeling tickled about something, like the way my dog (a somewhat new part of my life) draws the oohs and aahs out of folks we pass on the street. Delighted, tickled, a sweet yummy feeling in my stomach and heart. And then there are all kind of ways that get bigger, or more intense—hearing live music, like recent tributes to Abbey Lincoln and Thelonious Monk, all the irrepressible dancing at the edge of losing the through line that makes music jazz. I don’t know what to call that: joy, fulfillment? Music fills me up and spills over, spills out, stretches me to be bigger, intuit, and connect to more, hear the sounds light years away, of which these performances are only echoes. Art, books, poems, woods, laughter with friends, slow groove sex or a giggling quickie, movies, plays, a perfectly iced and lemon-tinged glass of seltzer, helping another feel and celebrate this free life, knowing someone for years and still being surprised by them. Writing, for the freedom of it. And on and on and on.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  I have had to ask for help, again and again, becoming porous, transparent, and more human. I had to learn how to say what I want in clear words and contend with the answers to my real longings instead of swallowing bitterness about unmet and unspoken wishes. Each day I am more and more a real person—it turns out this is the only way to move through these years that my projected “perfect” selves, which I created to impress others or protect my heart, simply cannot handle. I remember, daily, that none of this is explained and none of it is promised. I remind myself that even when I turn inward to quietly hermit, I am supported by people who love me and honor my boundaries. I touch my own skin, and it tells me that before there was any harm, there was miracle. When I reach an edge that feels impossible to go beyond, I laugh, softening any remaining rigidity in myself that makes me think I have control. I confess daily, “Here is where it hurts.” I let the healing come through connection. When I feel like a failure, I look at my plants, at how they wilt and seem to be dying, and then water and sun and my loving words bring them back to vibrancy. I let water move over me, sun change me, love reach me. I root down into the soil and back into my lineage, which reminds me that everything is temporary but nothing disappears, this is how life is. I reach forward and up, shaping a world that feels good for me, for all who look like me, for all who love like me, for all who have yet to realize that love is liberation. I let myself work through anger until all that is left is compassion. I cultivate justice within myself, rooted not in vengeance or righteousness but in love and interdependence. I work hard on answering my calling, listening to the bass notes of my life, following underground rivers to find more room for my whole self. I let my days be spent in love, connection, and creation. I recognize that my sorrow carves out the space for my joy,134 and that both in this lifetime and in the cycles of my lineage there is so much space that has been carved out by sorrow, and I get to fill it up with joy and pleasure. What a pleasure it is, after all, to be a free Black queer woman. To be a human, self-aware. To be of the earth, with such beauty and interconnectedness.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  With Two Old Bitches, Joanne Sandler and I get to hear and share older women’s stories about how they are living and have lived their lives, often reinventing themselves along the way. There’s a surprise in every conversation we share, some unexpected bit that challenges preconceived notions about older women or reveals another unfair obstacle they face as they age. Storytelling is so powerful, and asking questions is such a pleasure! The women we interview are so game—they answer our questions, no matter how unexpected, serious, or frivolous. Like Alta telling us about Mona Lisa Touch! We laugh a lot. And one of the surprises of the podcast has been the number of younger women who listen. It inspires them, they say, and their listening inspires us. amb. Yes, it is such a gift, there is so much in there that I, as someone about to turn forty, find really useful and aspirational. So Alta, you were a guest on that show, and you spoke about how you have been reclaiming your pleasure. It felt inspiring and clarifying, like a conversation that isn’t had in public often enough. So, first, can you each tell me a bit about how that conversation came to be—did you plan to go where you went with it? Alta. I absolutely did not plan! What came out was the result of feeling so comfy and kitchen-table-like with Ide and Joanne. I was an early interview, I think, and Ide and I had been in conversation about the unfolding of the project for a while. Of course, I was up for the interview and thought I had many things I wanted to celebrate and share. amb. And how does it feel to have that interview out in the world? Alta. A bit weird. It was fun, and I don’t mind that there’s a somewhat permanent record of my delight in life, including sex. On the other hand, there are moments when I think about all the things that I didn’t say, perhaps more serious, and wish I had. Then again, the side of me that showed up in the interview hasn’t had nearly as much airspace in recent years as my more sober serious-biz personality. amb. What do both of y’all wish people knew about pleasure over sixty? Ide. Our sense of “aliveness”—know what I mean?—doesn’t dim with age. Passion, in all its guises, doesn’t disappear. Death is the end, not being old. Older women can take their pleasure where they find it. A “why the fuck not!” mind-set helps, and most of the older women I know have that attitude. Think it was Alice Walker who wrote, “Resistance is the secret of joy.”112

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  The Empire, in particular, was always thick with sods: they strolled side-by-side with the gay girls of the promenade, or stood, in little knots, exchanging gossip, comparing fortunes, greeting one another with flapping hands and high, extravagant voices. They never looked at the stage, never cheered or applauded, only gazed at themselves in the mirror-glass or at each other’s powdered faces, or - more covertly - at the gentlemen who, rapidly or rather lingeringly, passed them by.I loved to walk with them, and watch them, and be watched by them in turn. I loved to stroll about the Empire - the handsomest hall in England, as Walter had described it, the hall to which Kitty had longed so ardently, so uselessly! for an invitation - I loved to stroll about it with my back to its glorious golden stage, my costume bright beneath the ungentle glare of its electric chandeliers, my hair gleaming, my trousers bulging, my lips pink, my figure and pose reeking, as the gay boys say, of lavender, their import bold and unmistakable - but false. The singers and comedians I never looked at once. I had finished with that world, entirely.All, as I have said, went smoothly; then, in the first few warm weeks of 1891 - that is, a year and more after my flight from Kitty - there came a bothersome interruption to my little routine.I returned to the knocking-shop after an evening of rather heavy renting to find the old proprietress missing, her chair overturned, and the door to my chamber splintered and flung wide. What had happened I never found out for sure; it seemed that the madam had been taken or chased away - though whether by a policeman or a rival bawd, no one professed to know. Anyway, thieves had taken advantage of her absence to steal into the house, to frighten and threaten the girls and their customers, and help themselves to anything that they could lift: the oozing mattresses and rugs, the broken looking-glasses, the few rickety bits of furniture — also my frocks, shoes, bonnet and purse. The loss was not a great one to me; but it meant that I must go home in my masculine attire - I was wearing the old Oxford bags, and a boater - and attempt to reach my room at Mrs Best’s without her catching me.It was quite late, and I walked very slowly to Smithfield, in the hope that all the Bests might be abed and sleeping by the time I got there - and, indeed, when I reached the house, the windows were dark and all seemed still.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  While executive editor at Essence magazine, the most widely read and longest-lasting magazine for Black women on the planet, Cheryll Y. Greene did many impossible things. With her sister-comrade Alexis De Veaux she transformed a beauty shop magazine into a transnational portal for Black feminist possibility. And in 1988 she made it physical. In 1988, Cheryll organized a gathering called the Essence Women Writers retreat in Nassau, Bahamas, with the collaboration of Stephanie Stokes (now Stephanie Stokes-Oliver) and the full support of the then-editor-in-chief of Essence, Susan Taylor. All the writers you want to name were there, and the ones who didn’t come were invited. Toni Cade Bambara, Sonia Sanchez, Octavia Butler, Lucille Clifton, Barbara Smith, Ntozake Shange, Thulani Davis, I can’t even name them all. What did they do? They met with editors at Essence to discuss what they would like to write in the magazine. They met with each other over cocktails and body-watched. They experimented with water sports. They flew and dove. They wore very bright colors. They bought sheer bathing suit wraps. They laughed so much and luxuriated in the Atlantic and the Blackness of it all. They honored their ancestors and living relatives in the Caribbean. And the food. Maybe, when some of them tried to parasail, Barbara Smith remembered the Black Feminist Retreat where she first saw aerial performance, a Black woman in silken fabrics dancing down from the ceiling, unleashing everyone’s libido, relearning lust. Maybe Ntozake giggled too much for Thulani to know it wasn’t just the salt air. One day, I sat on Cheryll’s living room floor and watched the video of the last night of the gathering. A Bahamian brother videotaped it the best he could while his mind was being blown. It was a circle. An old form for ceremony. And gently facilitated. Each writer would share about their work. What they wanted the other writers and editors to know. And on the video, I watched the circle become spiral. I saw some of the most outspoken women in the world say things they had never said before. I saw Toni Cade Bambara stand and reach her hands into the air proposing the people gathered make an anthology of poems and stories, and recipes and star-maps, and legal proceedings, you know, gather everything. I saw Octavia Butler demand a world where she wasn’t the only Black woman science fiction author. I saw Sonia Sanchez stand and place the writing of Black women squarely against the death of the species. I saw those who wore makeup cry it off, nodding their heads, yes.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  There is also pleasure in money itself. Women and femmes aren’t supposed to enjoy money, to luxuriate in it, to demand it. In some social justice circles, loving money is a sign of capitalist greed and selfishness. But feeling good about having enough money to put food on the table isn’t the same as hoarding wealth or supporting capitalism, and it isn’t “lean-in” feminism. Getting good wages is the harm reduction of capitalism, and poor/working-class women and femmes are entitled to demand money and take joy in their cash. We can learn from how sex workers revel in their money. Watch how they celebrate that night’s haul at the club (sometimes taking pics with their cats: a meme called “cats and stacks”), how bruja sex workers perform money-attracting rituals, get dollar signs tattooed on their wedding ring finger, organize their own workshops and online groups to troubleshoot business problems, concoct schemes for opening up men’s wallets in every avenue of life, celebrate financial successes, and commiserate with downturns. More than anyone else, sex workers teach us that our sexuality is our property (not his), that it is valuable (not priceless, the opposite of priceless actually), and that we have a right to unbridled joy about getting something for it. All of us doing undervalued feminized work (in the service industry, child care, personal support, teaching, counseling, secretaries, artists) can benefit from the gleeful sex worker mantra: “fuck you, pay me.” About 80 percent of sex workers are women. That’s about the same proportion of secretaries, nurses, and teachers. But when was the last time you saw a kindergarten teacher cracking jokes about being “a dope-ass cunt who loves money” or nurse hyping herself up by blasting “Bitch Betta Have My Money” as she prepares to go ask for a raise?50 Women and femmes who love money are free to be demanding. The world has tried to fool them into thinking that getting paid for care or sex “cheapens” it. Please. You know what’s “cheap”? When men think they’re entitled to free and unlimited care, attention, and sex. That’s cheap. But “money can’t buy you happiness,” right? Like fuck it can’t. Try telling that to the twenty-year-old single mother who, after six months of stripping, can stack presents under the Christmas tree for her three-year-old. Or to the forty-year-old escort who can send her son to university, the first one in their family to go to college. Or to the fifty-something grandmother missing a front tooth who gets to enjoy a yearly trip somewhere warm with her sugar daddy. Money buys protection. It buys time off and privacy. And it buys nice, pretty shit. Money also buys food, housing, and health care. Getting paid enough to meet our needs—and more—feels good. I’m not romanticizing the sex industry, I know it has risks; I’m just not going to romanticize economic deprivation in the name of being a “good girl,” either.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  In a few weeks, you’re back in Ohio and have a crush on a boy you met at the roller skating rink. His name is Brian, and, although he’s white, he’s from California and just moved to Ohio last year because his parents got divorced. He is less … provincial than the kids you’ve met in Ohio. With Brian, you learn more about what you actually like. It feels good to put on cherry chapstick and softly kiss while sitting in his lap with your legs wrapped around his waist. It feels good to feel his hands against your skin, rubbing your nipples below your bra. It feels good to hold hands on a picnic blanket at a Cleveland Philharmonic concert. But you do not love Brian, and so you do not want to go much past second base with him. When he tells you he’d like to be your long-distance boyfriend when you go back to New Jersey for your senior year, you tell him that’s sweet and accept the charcoal drawing he’s made for you. You hang it on your bedroom wall and stare at it while you break up with him over the phone a week later, telling him that long-distance really isn’t your thing, you need to focus on your college applications. You look at it all year long, to remember. You feel like some seal has been broken. You go to eighteen-and-under dance clubs with your friends and sneak into Indian American college parties at Rutgers. Guys always ask you to dance, and you always say yes. You don’t quite like the feeling of them mashing their pelvis into yours and holding you there, swaying. But you like the attention. The summer between high school and college, your grandmother pays for you to travel to western Europe on a student delegation with People to People. It is an expensive trip, just a year after an expensive party. You know it is guilt money.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Another way I cultivate pleasure in my life is the ritual of getting ready. I love getting ready. I really enjoy the process. I really enjoy arriving in my body and my self and sculpting myself and choosing the various ways in which I’m gonna express myself through makeup, through clothes, [and] when I had hair, through hair. It’s an intentional, pleasurable act and ritual for me. Growing up, my mom and her sisters, my aunts, they loved getting ready. We lived in Atlanta, and my mother was young when she had me, so she was still a young woman doing her thing. So her and her sisters would get ready to go out to the club. It was a whole affair. First of all, we only had one bathroom, so they each had to take turns. The music was playing, they’re doing their hair, asking each other their opinions on, like, “what do you think about this outfit?” “Should I do this?” “Does this look right on me?” And, you know, complimenting each other. It was a whole sisterhood ritual of getting ready. The women in my family enjoy looking good. My apple didn’t fall too far from the tree in that sense. I enjoy sequins. I enjoy getting ready, the process of it, the arriving. I really appreciate that process. I cultivate part of that through Colored Girls Hustle. Colored Girls Hustle does many things, but the way it started was through creating adornment, handmade adornment. I arrived at the name because I was thinking about really aligning my work with my passion, my purpose, and my pleasure. For me, the hustle was about that alignment. It’s not about a scarcity framework, it’s about doing work that has meaning for you, and it’s about fulfilling your self-expression and your highest potential. I want people to also look good while doing it, you know? I think that expression is really an important part of our ability to manifest the things that we were gifted with. I made some pins. One of my little catchphrases is that “jewelry is a product, and adornment is a practice, and Colored Girls Hustle is in the business of adornment.” We’re in the practice of adorning our bodies. Things that, like, really reflect the intentions of who we are and what we stand for. Now, what that’s evolved into, the earrings I’ve produced recently, they each come with a name and an intention. Like Expansion. It’s about you in the universe. Elevation, we’re all on the come-up. Sunrise, it’s about your glow-up. Each earring carries an intention, and even the words that I put on buttons or T-shirts or stickers, it’s about affirming your life, your walk, and your hustle. And so that’s one of the ways in which I cultivate pleasure. I organize my life around pleasure, so it’s hard for me to stay in a space, an organization, a job if it doesn’t feel good. And I think that may sound flighty.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Mai’a. I have a natural and crafted talent for giving and receiving pleasure. I like having sex without having all the emotional labor involved. I like practicing my craft. It feels like writing a good poem or dancing to a song you know by heart. It feels good to be good at something. Holiday. I engage in it because I love pleasure and exploring different types and ways to please myself, be pleased, please others, and learn others. And having many different types of sexual partners and different situations that lead to those sexual partnerships is a huge learning opportunity for me as it relates to my identities, to my sense of safety, to being validated. Having casual sex is like a human experiment of desire. Leah. I grew up in a family with two parents who had an utterly miserable, abusive relationship that both of them felt they couldn’t leave. Part of my resistance was to be like, fuck that, I’m never doing that. Marriage is a prison of death. I wanted to have sex with lots of people and be in different kinds of loverships with some of them. I also am a neurodiverse hermit warrior queen who loves and needs lots of time to myself and “TOTAL SEXUAL AUTONOMY.” After a childhood and young adulthood filled with parental, sexual, physical, and emotional abuse, a ton of bullying, sexual assault at school, and very little permitted autonomy (I wasn’t allowed to shut the door to my room or take a shower by myself for years), having casual sex was incredibly healing because I needed some huge built-in boundaries after not being allowed any. It was a place to have intense, contained intimacy and magic. amb. What is the best thing about casual sex? Leah. The feeling of autonomy and control. The ability to explore and learn about myself. Being sexual and getting up and leaving afterward. How it was liberating to me as a brown femme survivor to be, like, I get to have wildly uncontained sexuality. Casual sex makes me feel connected to a lineage of queer sex radicalism, public sex and non-married/committed sex, which I feel is getting lost. It felt radical to articulate that sex can just be about pleasure, it doesn’t have to be about Commitment, Marriage, and the Family. I loved my rituals of getting ready, adornment, going out, and walking and feeling sensual in my body. Also, small talk bores me, and I think you can learn a lot about someone by fucking them!

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  If I were living purely from my mind, I might have become a nun. And I don’t mean a naughty nun with no panties under my habit—I really love routines and quiet. I can get a ton of pleasure from precision, rigor, and discipline (those who have experienced me as a teacher may have an inkling of this). I like being of service. And I feel a thrumming, full aliveness when in conversation with the divine. I think a lot about what god is, how god is, and where we are relating to and running from and surrendering to god. My answers are always shifting, but that conversation has been continuous in my life. But! If I were living purely from my body, I might have achieved some world record for sexual activity, or at least be the belle of some wild bordello. Perhaps a Black Moulin Rouge singer4—I love seduction, I love sex, I love an exposed shoulder, the curves of the hip, the moment of realizing that under the top layer of clothing there’s no bra or boxers containing the body I am observing. I love the unspeakable heat of romance. I love all the ways we are sensual. I like to smell good, taste everything yummy, feel how alive skin is, listen to sounds of breath and pleasure, see the beauty of flesh and bones. Laugh uncontrollably. Play. Feel alive. My body has the capacity to sense immense pleasure, and as I get older I keep intentionally expanding my sensual awareness and decolonizing it so that I can sense more pleasure than capitalism believes in. I am a hermit nudist at heart. It has taken me a while to learn this, but I feel most at home when I am alone and naked. Or with someone where we can be alone/together, naked. I know that my body could never be inappropriate. If I walk around naked all the time, or wear a muumuu slit to the moon to show my big dimpled thighs, or let my tummy hang soft and low, it’s right. I am of nature. I have cycles in my body that reflect the cycles of day and night, of the seasons, of the moon and the tides. My body is a gorgeous miracle. I know it is only conditioning and shame, particularly fat shame, that keeps me covered (especially when I am in places where it’s too hot to wear a top and men are running around shirtless).