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 My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  This joy, and this belief I want to impart to others more than almost anything else, for this has been to me a new Gospel of courage and resolve and certain reward, a man’s creed teaching that as you grow in wisdom and courage and kindness, all good things are added unto you. I find that I am outrunning my story and giving here a stage of thought and belief that only became mine much later; but the beginning of my individual soul-life was this experience, that I had been blind to natural beauty and now could see; this was the root and germ, so to speak, of the later faith that guided all my mature life, filling me with courage and spilling over into hope and joy ineffable. Very soon the first command of it came to my lips almost every hour: “Blame your own blindness! always blame yourself!” ------------------------------------------------------------------------ FROM SCHOOL TO AMERICA. Chapter IV. Early in January there was a dress rehearsal of the Trial Scene of “The Merchant of Venice.” The Grandee of the neighborhood who owned the great park, Sir W. W. W., some M.P.’s, notably a Mr. Whalley who had a pretty daughter and lived in the vicinity, and the Vicar and his family were invited, and others whom I did not know; but with the party from the Vicarage came Lucille. The big schoolroom had been arranged as a sort of theatre and the estrade at one end where the Head-Master used to throne it on official occasions, was converted into a makeshift stage and draped by a big curtain that could be drawn back or forth at will. The Portia was a very handsome lad of sixteen named Herbert, gentle and kindly, yet redeemed from effeminacy by the fact that he was the fleetest sprinter in the school and could do the hundred yards in eleven and a half seconds. The “Duke” was, of course, Jones and the merchant “Antonio” a big fellow named Vernon, and I had got Edwards the part of “Bassanio” and a pretty boy in the Fourth Form was taken as “Nerissa.” So far as looks went the cast was passable; but the “Duke” recited his lines as if they had been imperfectly learned and so the “Trial Scene” opened badly. But the part of “Shylock” suited me intimately and I had learned how to recite. Now before E… and Lucille, I was set on doing better than my best. When my cue came I bowed low before the “Duke” and then bowed again to left and right of him in silence and formally, as if I, the outcast Jew, were saluting the whole court; then in a voice that at first I simply made slow and clear and hard, I began the famous reply: “I have possessed your Grace of what I purpose; And by our Holy Sabbath have I sworn To have the due and forfeit of my bond.”

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Thus we spent the whole afternoon, till supper time in a continued circle of love delights, kissing, turtle-billing, toying, and all the rest of the feast. At length, supper was served in, before which Charles had, for I do not know what reason, slipped his clothes on; and sitting down by the bed side, we made table and tablecloth of the bed and sheets, whilst he suffered nobody to attend or serve but himself. He ate with a very good appetite, and seemed charmed to see me eat. For my part, I was so transported with the comparison of the delights I now swam in, with the insipidity of all my past scenes of life, that I thought them sufficiently cheap, at even the price of my ruin, or the risk of their not lasting. The present possession was all my little head could find room for. We lay together that night, when, after playing repeated prizes of pleasure, nature, overspent and satisfied, gave us up to the arms of sleep: those of my dear youth encircled me, the consciousness of which made even that sleep more delicious. Late in the morning I waked, first; and observing my lover slept profoundly, softly disengaged myself from his arms, scarcely daring to breathe, for fear of shortening his repose; my cap, my hair, my shift, were all in disorder, from the rufflings I had undergone; and I took this opportunity to adjust and set them as well as I could: whilst, every now and then, looking at the sleeping youth, with inconceivable fondness and delight, and reflecting on all the pain he had put me to, tacitly owned that the pleasure had overpaid me for my sufferings. It was then broad day. I was sitting up in the bed, the clothes of which were all tossed, or rolled off, by the unquietness of our motions, from the sultry heat of the weather; nor could I refuse myself a pleasure that solicited me so irresistibly, as this fair occasion of feasting my sight with all those treasures of youthful beauty I had enjoyed, and which lay now almost entirely naked, his shirt being trussed up in a perfect wisp, which the warmth of the season and room made me easy about the consequence of. I hung over him enamoured indeed! and devoured all his naked charms with only two eyes, when I could have wished them at least an hundred for the fuller enjoyment of the gaze. Oh! could I paint his figure as I see it now, still present to my transported imagination! a whole length of an all perfect manly beauty in full view. Think of a face without a fault, glowing with all the opening bloom and verdant freshness of an age, in which beauty is of either sex, and which the first down over his upper lip scarce began to distinguish.

• 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 Bestiary (2020)

  The latest is a two-day project, a giant crab that needs to span the whole side of the minivan. It’s for a seafood supply chain that recently got sued for polluted fish. Jie hires me to help her paint the giant crab, which needs to smile and wear a tuxedo and look like it is completely not poisonous. We use a mix of house paint and spray paint, wear masks to avoid inhaling fumes. We learn from Ma, whose lungs on the X-ray look like nibbled cheese, like some rodent is burrowing a home inside her. Ba has bad lungs too, but that’s from the war, the piece of shrapnel that’s still nested in his chest and once set off the metal detector Jie and I made. It comforts me, that if he was ever buried I could locate him with a radio and some wire, no gravestone necessary. No need for aboveground grief. Jie traces the shape of the crab with permanent marker and I fill it in. Orange first, then black for the shadowing. For practice, Jie and I spray-paint orange crabs all over the street, some of them lopsided or missing legs, some of them looking like stains. Sometime in the afternoon, while the sun is pearling the sweat on our skin, the spray-painted crabs stand up. They walk up and down the street on their half- assed legs, limping in circles and mincing the gravel. Jie and I run after them, flip them onto their backs so they’re clawing at air, cutting the clouds. There are two dozen in total, two dozen crabs we’ve drawn on the street and traced into meat. I say we should sell the crabs, but they’re too strange-limbed to be eaten, too botched to breed. Jie decides they’d make good pets, so we fill a garbage bag with hose-water and toss each of the crabs inside, knotting it at the neck. When the van’s painted, she drives away inside it, leaves me with the cans and brushes and stencils. The crabs awake in her passenger seat, pincers snipping holes in the plastic bag. When we boil them that night, their meat dissolves into salt-foam, and inside their bellies are baby teeth, all the teeth we lost and swallowed in the dark, afraid that Ma would see our parts coming loose and send us back to the factory. _ At home, Ma is asleep on a stool in the kitchen, her hands in the sink, her palms a litany of calluses.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  "As I rubbed myself against him, he underwent all the sensations I was feeling; for I was hardly drained of the last drop before I was likewise bathed with his own seething sperm. We did not kiss each other any further; our languid, half-open, lifeless lips only aspired each other's breath. Our sightless eyes saw each other no more, for we fell into that divine prostration which follows shattering ecstacy. "Oblivion, however, did not follow, but we remained in a benumbed state of torpor, speechless, forgetting everything except the love we bore each other, unconscious of everything save the pleasure of feeling each other's bodies, which, however, seemed to have lost their own individuality, mingled and confounded as they were together. Apparently we had but one head and one heart, for they beat in such unison, and the same vague thoughts flitted through both our brains. "Why did not Jehovah strike us dead that moment? Had we not provoked Him enough? How was it that the jealous God was not envious of our bliss? Why did He not hurl one of His avenging thunderbolts at us, and annihilate us?" "What! and have pitched you both headlong into hell?" "Well, what then? Hell, of course, is no excelsior—no place of false aspirations after an unreachable ideal of fallacious hopes and bitter disappointments. Never pretending to be what we are not, we shall find there true contentedness of mind, and our bodies will be able to develop those faculties with which nature has endowed them. Not being either hypocrites or dissemblers, the dread of being seen such as we really are can never torment us. "If we are grossly bad, we shall at least be truthfully so. There will be amongst us that honesty which here on earth exists only amongst thieves; and moreover, we shall have that genial companionship of fellow-beings after our own heart. "Is hell, then, such a place to be dreaded? Thus, even admitting of an after-life in the bottomless pit, which I do not, hell would only be the paradise of those whom nature has created fit for it. Do animals repine for not having been created men? No, I think not. Why should we, then, make ourselves unhappy for not having been born angels? "At that moment it seemed as if we were floating somewhere between heaven and earth, not thinking that everything that has a beginning has likewise an end. "The senses were blunted, so that the downy couch upon which we were resting was like a bed of clouds. A death-like silence was reigning around us. The very noise and hum of the great city seemed to have stopped—or, at least, we did not hear it. Could the world have stopped in its rotation, and the hand of Time have arrested itself in its dismal march?

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  And it was all quite as he promised and directed. He sent us to costumiers and tailors, and had Kitty decked out in a dozen different gentlemanly guises; and when the suits were made he sent us to photographers, to have her likeness taken as she held a policeman’s whistle to her lip, or shouldered a rifle or a sailor’s rope. He found songs to fit the costumes, and brought them round to Ginevra Road himself, to strike them out on Mrs Dendy’s terrible old piano for Kitty to try, and for the rest of us to listen to and consider. Most importantly of all he secured contracts, at halls in Hoxton, and Poplar, and Kilburn, and Bow. Within a fortnight, Kitty’s London career was fairly launched. Now she did not change into her ordinary girl’s clothes when she finished her act at the Star; instead, I stood with her coat and her basket ready, and when she stepped from before the footlights we ran together to the stage door, to where our brougham waited to lumber fitfully with us through the city traffic to the next theatre. Now, instead of wearing one suit for the whole of her turn she wore three or four; and I was her dresser in real earnest, helping her tear at buttons and links while the orchestra played between the songs, and the audience waited, half-way between expectation and impatience, for her to reappear.The hours we kept now, of course, were rather strange ones, for as long as Kitty continued to work two, three or four halls a night we would arrive back at Ginevra Road at half-past twelve or one, weary and aching but still giddy and hot from our moonlit criss-crossings of the city, our anxious waits in dressing-rooms and wings. Here we would find Sims and Percy, and Tootsie and her girl- and boy-friends, all fresh and flushed and gay as we, making tea and cocoa, Welsh rabbit and pancakes, in Mrs Dendy’s kitchen. Then Mrs Dendy herself would appear - for she had kept theatrical lodgers for so long she had begun to keep theatrical hours, too - and suggest a game of cards, or a song or a dance. It could not long be kept secret, in that house, that I liked to sing and had a pretty voice, and so sometimes I might raise a chorus or two, along with Kitty. Now I never went to bed before three, and never woke in the morning before nine or ten o’clock - so swiftly and completely had I forgotten my old oyster-maidish habits.I did not, of course, forget my family or my home. I sent them cards, as I have said; I sent them notices of Kitty’s shows, and gossip from the theatre.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Womanizer. Yes but—or, rather, yes and—the body is such a nonnegotiable place to learn and listen for pleasure. We toys come across people all the time who think they can’t feel pleasure, can’t squirt, don’t have a g-spot or prostate, have no nipple sensation—don’t think they deserve it. And that first time they get to control the experience, press and pace and open and design their own good feeling, with or without my help … I think it changes people, changes what feels possible. The body learns so quickly! amb. Testify! I feel like even when I didn’t love how my body looked, and when I struggled to be seen by others, much less tell them how to make me feel good, y’all always let me know that I was a magical creature capable of something beautiful. And that truth grew from deep inside all the way up to the surface. Womanizer. Really glad to be of service. Have you talked to Wand yet? They love this stuff. amb. On it. Thanks again, for all you do. 8 This essay first appeared as adrienne maree brown, “The Pleasure Dome: Conversations with My Sex Toys,” May 17, 2017, Bitch Media (blog), https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/pleasure-dome-conversations-my-sex-toys.Sex Majik (No One Told Me to Do It)It was the full moon shining in my window I waited, a wide sea moonlight on my thighs heat on my fingertips I was a wave, then a million After, I was trembling Writing on a page Everything I needed Everything I had to have What I couldn’t die without What was in my veins I reached into my self Covered my fingers with yes, My pleasure, my sea slick Wrote my name onto the page Mine mine mine, my pleasure My life would be my pleasure I buried this note in my bed Planted it under my tongue In my sheets On my temples Everywhere, my pleasure, Everywhere, my prayer Nipples Are MagicIt has recently occurred to me that claiming the massive possible pleasure coming from nipples is a feminist activity.9 This idea, unsurprisingly, occurred to me one day while under the influence of nipple pleasure, but the idea held even when my head cleared. I must rewind. My first conscious experience of patriarchy and boobs was in middle school. As my body went through puberty and my breasts filled in and grew heavy, it/they became objects of attention. Not the kind I wanted. Boys, generally without asking, out of the blue, wanted to smush and fondle them, to grab them with bruising pressure. They acted as if all the breasts at school belonged to them—not us, just our bodies. The boys’ responses to my breasts made me feel exposed and awkward all the time. I discovered pleasure in my body early, but I came to believe that breasts were too tender for other people’s hands to touch, especially rough boy hands.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  The food was so greasy it shot down our throats before we could swallow. My brother and I tried hating him, but Duck Uncle’s Sichuan accent was honky and high-pitched and made us laugh until our throats tied themselves into bows. He even promised to teach us to hunt ducks, cutting targets out of shoeboxes and letting us shoot them with his BB gun. My brother had the best aim out of the three of us, threading the pellet through the penciled-in eye. I was too afraid of backfire, so I only pretended to pull the trigger, making the gunshot sound with my mouth. Duck Uncle pretended to believe me, said I’d killed so many. But I’d aimed at nothing, the bullet unspent as our silence, the ducks just make-believe. _ In a past life, our city was a landfill. In the summers, the air smelled as if it had passed through our bowels, hot and sour and slurred. My brother and I debated if the stink was spoiled plums or our farts or our father expiring from the country. Before I was born, the city bulldozed over buttocks of garbage for the roads to be built. The landfill lived just below us, digesting itself, flexing its belly. The soil was too soft to stand on and every year the houses kneeled deeper in their dung. In the backyard, my brother and I dug down to find what was dying. Our mother bought us snorkel masks to wear outside, as if sipping air through a smaller opening would shrink the scent. We met after school in the backyard and drew holes in the dirt with our toes. The grass was a ghost of its former green, and most of it had been scalped away by the heat and our feet. In the grass we found trash that smelled recently deceased: soda can tabs, beer bottles with a piss-colored liquid living inside it. My brother said we probably wouldn’t find anything else, but I said the point was the hole itself. I’d learned that there were gases trapped in the soil wherever trash was buried, and if we didn’t dig holes for the ground to fart out its gas, this whole city would explode: Houses like knocked-out teeth. Blacktop rising as a crow flock. Tracing three more holes in the dirt, he asked me what color the gas was and I said, The same as our breath. That’s what made it lethal: Its taste camouflaged with our tongues. When it entered your lungs, it became a blade inside you. From the kitchen window, our mother watched as we plotted the rest of our holes. When we came in, she scrubbed us so raw we couldn’t sleep with the sheets on our skin. Still we kept digging, saving the city from its flatulent past. We dug with our hands and waited until evening when the smell of the landfill was only as bad as our breath. My brother kneeled first.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  I was soon laid in bed, and scarce languished an instant for the darling partner of it, before he was undressed and got between the sheets, with his arms clasped round me, giving and taking, with gust inexpressible, a kiss of welcome, that my heart rising to my lips stamped with its warmest impression, concurring to my bliss, with that delicate and voluptuous emotion which Charles alone had the secret to excite, and which constitutes the very life, the essence of pleasure. Mean while, two candles lighted on a side-table near us, and a joyous wood fire, threw a light into the bed, that took from one sense, of great importance to our joys, all pretext for complaining of its being shut out of its share of them; and, indeed, the sight of my idolized youth was alone, from the ardour with which I had wished for it, without other circumstance, a pleasure to die of. But as action was now a necessity to desires so much on edge as ours, Charles, after a very short prelusive dalliance, lifting up my linen and his own, laid the broad treasures of his manly chest close to my bosom, both beating with the tenderest alarms: when now, the sense of his glowing body, in naked touch with mine, took all power over my thoughts out of my own disposal, and delivered up every faculty of the soul to the sensiblest of joys, that affecting me infinitely more with my distinction of the person, than of the sex, now brought my heart deliriously into play: my heart, which, eternally constant to Charles, had never taken any part in my original sacrifices to the calls of constitution, complaisance, or interest. But ah! what became of me, when as the powers of solid pleasure thickened upon me, I could not help feeling the stiff stake that had been adorned with the trophies of my despoiled virginity, bearing hard and inflexible against one of my thighs, which I had not yet opened, from a true principle of modesty, revived by a passion too sincere to suffer any aiming at the false merit of difficulty, or my putting on an impertinent mock coyness.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  The trip from Bethnal Green to Cable Street did indeed take us through some of the roughest, poorest, squalidest districts in the city, and could never, ordinarily, be very cheerful. I knew the route, for I had walked it often with Florence: I knew which courts were grimmest, which factories sweated their workers hardest, which tenements housed the saddest and most hopeless families. But we were out that night together - as Florence herself had admitted - for pleasure’s sake; and though it might seem strange to say it, our journey was indeed a pleasant one, and seemed to take us over a rather different landscape to the one we normally trod. We passed gin-palaces and penny-gaffs, coffee-shops and public-houses: they were not the grim and dreary places that they sometimes were, tonight, but luminous with warmth and light and colour, thick with laughter and shouts, and with the reeking odours of beer and soup and gravy. We saw spooning couples; and girls with cherries on their hats, and lips to match them; and children bent over hot, steaming packets of tripe, and trotters, and baked potatoes. Who knew to what sad homes they might be returning, in an hour or two? For now, however, there was a queer kind of glamour to them, and to the very streets - Diss Street, Sclater Street, Hare Street, Fashion Street, Plumbers Row, Coke Street, Pinckin Street, Little Pearl Street - in which they walked. ‘How gay the city seems tonight!’ said Florence wonderingly. It is for you, I wanted to reply: for you and your new costume. But I only smiled at her and took her arm; then, ‘Look at that coat!’ I said, as we passed a boy in a yellow felt jacket that was bright, in the Brick Lane shadows, as a lantern. ‘I knew a girl once, oh! she would have loved that coat...’ It did not take us long, after that, to reach Cable Street. Here we turned left, then right; and at the end of this road I saw the public-house that was, I guessed, our destination: a squat, flat-roofed little building with a gas-jet in a plum-coloured shade above the door, and a garish sign - The Frigate - that reminded me how near our walk had brought us to the Thames. ‘It’s this way,’ said Florence self-consciously.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  I realize I started doing something that I was not aware of. When I walk into a room, I’m aware of how they see me. I’m aware of how I see myself. I would fucking amplify the goofiness. I would amplify like—I’m already naturally just likely to make light of a moment. But I would amplify that to be more accessible, to break down that concern. So you’re like, “Oh, I don’t have to be fucking scared of this dude or intimidated because he’s fucking weird and kind of goofy.” And that was the result of just trying to make people, make it more accessible, so I can do my work. And after a while I realized, I was like, “Oh, shit, that’s what I’m doing, oh, okay. Well, I’m gonna do that in a mindful way.” At Standing Rock was that moment where it was like me wanting to be contrary to the narrative that you have to be a fucking angry-ass protestor. Or an angry-ass, down-ass motherfucker, like, with a “fuck the police” kind of narrative. And I’m like, I wanna go a different route. Like, I think that sometimes we get caught in the spectacle of it, doing it for the spectacle and the dogma of what it means to be, you know, against the machine. And that was a challenge. I think there were a lot of people that pushed back at me. There was a lot of critique of me. Of how I went about it. You know, people saying “you’re not down enough.” amb. I imagine that people also are, like, are you taking this seriously enough? But then, people also wanna follow you. Your lens is an accessible lens, an enjoyable lens. Dallas. Yeah, no, totally. Every step of the way I love complicating the narrative. Our job is to complicate our own narrative, our own community narrative, the world narrative as much as possible, just because it’s so complex. And the fact that you could have, like, the most hardcore anarchist sorts of folks who were there like … they still have a life, and they fucking find things funny. But there’s the spectacle. amb. But it’s like that’s gotta be offstage. Dallas. That’s offstage. When you’re onstage, boom, “this is who I am, and I’m hard, hard, hard.” I’m like, fuck, you don’t have to be—you wake up hard? You know? Like … amb. [laughing inappropriately] I mean, some people do. Dallas. Yeah some people really do. I just love the challenge of trying to exhibit the complexity of everybody. amb. This is part of our wholeness—being able to laugh at these things.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Sami. I don’t think BDSM is for everyone. But I do think the communication skills, the self-reflection, the after-care practices, and the play elements of BDSM are useful for everyone. Maybe you never want to be tied up or never want to tie someone up, but talking to your partner about your desires, identifying things you might want to do once you build trust with a person, having safe words or code words to quickly communicate to your partner how you’re feeling, checking in with someone after a sexual interaction, these are things all relationships would benefit from, I believe. Power play is central to BDSM, but all the techniques folks have developed to ensure power play can occur safely and consensually are valuable in all sexual and intimate interactions. amb. Thank you for that insight. Last question—would you share with us one of the most pleasurable experiences you have had at the intersections of disability, BDSM, and Black queer bodies? Sami. The intersection of all of these things is a rare feat! In terms of personal experiences, I once attended a women/female-only kinky sex party that was so good about inclusion and access that I want it modeled everywhere. They asked people about access needs in advance, so we had a wheelchair-accessible room, no scented products, and a variety of snack options for different dietary needs. Prior to starting, everyone introduced themselves with name, identities we wanted to share, how we were feeling, any triggers we had, and what we wanted out of that night. As a fat Black queer person, I felt very safe in that space, which is not my experience in all BDSM spaces. The night was so fun and sexy and sweet all at once. There was a literal buffet of dicks—a table just covered in dildos and vibrators people brought to share (along with lots of safer sex equipment like gloves and condoms). Outside of my own experience, though, I also really like the work of Sins Invalid, a performance group in the Bay Area run by mostly disabled queer people and disabled people of color. Their films and performances often really embrace sexuality and occasionally kink among disabled queers and POCs as well. 38 Sami Schalk, Bodyminds Reimagined: Disability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018).39 Ariane Cruz, The Color of Kink: Black Women, BDSM, and Pornography (New York: New York University Press, 2016).Fuck You, Pay MeThe Pleasures of Sex Work Chanelle Gallant Chanelle Gallant has been a delight, comrade and teacher of mine in the realm of sex trade. She is currently working on a book—a theory of sexual labor. “What can I do to please you?” he asks as she stands before him, slowly unbuttoning his shirt. She opens the next button, gives him her slow, practiced smile, and says with a wink, “You can leave your money on the table, sweetie.”

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Jodie. I’ve learned I love pleasure and can notice what pleasures me and create it. Adrienne is a pleasure extrovert and Dani is a pleasure introvert. They both have pleasure superpowers. And I think I vacillate somewhere between them. We celebrate each other’s pleasure. Adrienne is so good at naming all of the things to strive for. She gives me stretch goals. I’ve learned to create spaces that bring me infinite pleasure. I love my apartment. I created a collection of little tiny antique frames with all of the people I most love in them, and they are all around the house. There is currently a picture of us woes in Vancouver making our woe sign being transposed onto a six-by-six piece of wood that’s going to go in all our houses. It will be in my bedroom. And this super sweet precious little glass antique frame that has a pic of Bel in it. They are in my bedroom. At the foot of my bed, by the window, with all of the precious things. I get to see them when I first wake up. That is so much pleasure. The woes vibranium mugs arrive this week. It gives me great pleasure to imagine sipping tea apart but together. I feel like my woes taught me to live, love, travel well. Dani. Our relationships have deepened my appreciation of the set and setting approach to pleasure. I think it’s typically used with regard to drug use, but for me it has a broader application. My ability to take risks, stop worrying, relax, enjoy, and accept pleasure is connected to whether I feel safe in and trust the environment (setting) and whether I’m in a good state of mind (mind-set) that will allow me to embrace whatever’s going on. Because I trust you two and, because I know that our spidey senses are pretty much aligned, we often create ideal environments wherever we go—in each other’s homes, on vacation, whatever. And, again, because we’re aligned and I don’t have a ton of defenses up or concerns rolling through my head when we’re together, my mind-set tends to be really positive when I’m around you both. Our relationships have reminded me to prioritize pleasure, even when I don’t feel like I have time for it or necessarily “deserve” it. You two remind me that my pleasure matters.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  You mix with actors and ballet-girls, and make friends with them. Your dressing-room is large and private and warm - for you are really expected to change and make-up in it, not arrive, breathless, at the stage door, having buttoned on your costume in your brougham. You are handed lines to speak, and you speak them, steps to take, and you take them, costumes to wear - the most wonderful costumes you ever saw in your life, costumes of fur and satin and velvet - and you wear them, then pass them back to the wardrobe-mistress and let her worry about mending them and keeping them neat. The crowds you have to play before are the kindest, gayest crowds there ever were: you will hurl all manner of nonsense at them and they will shriek with laughter, merely because it is Christmas and they are determined to be jolly. It is like a holiday from real life - except that you are paid twenty pounds a week, if you are as lucky as we were then, to enjoy it. The Cinderella in which we played that year was a particularly splendid one. The title role was taken by Dolly Arnold - a lovely girl with a voice like a linnet’s, and a waist so slim her trademark was to wear a necklace as a belt. It was rather odd to see Kitty spooning with her upon the stage, kissing her while the clock showed a minute-to-midnight - though it was odder still, perhaps, to think that no one in the audience called out Toms! now, or even appeared to think it: they only cheered when the Prince and Cinderella were united at the end, and drawn on stage, by half-a-dozen pygmy horses, in their wedding-car. Aside from Dolly Arnold, there were other stars - artistes whose turns I had once paid to watch and clap at, at the Canterbury Palace of Varieties. It made me feel very green, to have to work with them and talk to them as equals. I had only ever sung and danced, before, at Kitty’s side; now, of course, I had to act - to walk on stage with a hunting retinue and say, ‘My lords, where is Prince Casimir, our master?’; to slap my thigh and make terrible puns; to kneel before Cinderella with a velvet cushion, and place the slipper of glass upon her tiny foot - then lead the crowd in three rousing cheers when it was found to fit it. If you have ever seen a panto at the Brit, you will know how marvellous they are.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  I identify as a Black mixed person in the particular racial construct of this country at this time. I understand that race is a social construct, not a biological one—and in this life I experience a lot of pleasure in being Black. I love Black girl magic, Black joy, Black love, and work toward Black liberation. I feel unapologetic glee at the ways in which we subvert white supremacy, dominate culture, and “coolness,” often inviting people to the pleasures we have constructed from dreams and thin air. And … I understand this to be temporary—that there were, among my ancestors, feelings of love to be of tribes whose names I will never know or from nations no longer on any maps. In the future, there may be a time when the term “Black” feels to my nibblings’ nibblings the way the terms “Negro” or “Quadroon” sound to me now;2 perhaps these future nibblings will invent new terminology indicating some way of understanding themselves that I cannot comprehend. There may be a time beyond these borders, beyond these racial constructs, beyond this planet even. I feel humble in the face of all that time. And, in this time, it’s a gift to be Black. Similarly, I am learning that much of how we experience and practice gender is a social construct—and I love the particular pleasures of being a woman. I love being of women who transform the brutal conditions we survive, who are upending rape culture, knowing we are inferior to no one, weaving our suffering into a fierce togetherness, into homes, chosen families, radical sisterhood, and tomorrows. And I’m a woman with some boy in me and haven’t found the language for that. I know it is a privilege to feel aligned with the gender assignment I was given at birth. I love the bodies I was born from and with. And I love the wildly diverse spectrum of bodies I have gotten to hold, kiss, doula, and love in my lifetime. I imagine there have been periods in my ancestry when gender was held very differently, maybe didn’t matter so much, or was less binary. And I imagine there will be a future with a multitude of widely known and understood genders. In this moment, I get to be part of the expansion of possible genders that can live and love safely on this planet.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  "'And now you must take my place. You must make me feel what you felt. You will now be active and I passive; but we must try another position, for it is really tiresome to stand after all the fatigue we have undergone.' "'And what am I to do, for you know I am quite a novice?' "'Sit down there,' he replied, pointing to a stool constructed for the purpose, 'I'll ride on you whilst you impale me as if I were a woman. It is a mode of locomotion of which the ladies are so fond that they put it into practice whenever they get the slightest chance. My mother actually rode a gentleman under my very eyes. I was in the parlour when a friend happened to call, and had I been sent out suspicions might have been aroused, so I was made to believe that I was a very naughty little boy, and I was put in a corner with my face to the wall. Moreover, she told me that if I cried or turned round she'd put me to bed; but if I were good she'd give me a cake. I obeyed for one or two minutes, but after that, hearing an unusual rustle, and a loud breathing and panting, I saw what I could not understand at the time, but what was clear to me many years afterwards.' "He sighed, shrugged his shoulders, then smiled and added,—'Well, sit down there.' "I did as I was bidden. He first knelt down to say his prayers to Priapus—which was, after all, a more dainty bit to kiss than the old Pope's gouty toe—and having bathed and tickled the little god with his tongue, he got a-straddle over me. As he had already lost his maidenhood long ago, my rod entered far more easily in him than his had done in me, nor did I give him the pain that I had felt, although my tool is of no mean size. "He stretched his hole open, the tip entered, he moved a little, half the phallus was plunged in; he pressed down, lifted himself up, then came down again; after one or two strokes the whole turgid column was lodged within his body. When he was well impaled he put his arms round my neck, and hugged and kissed me. "'Do you regret having given yourself to me?' he asked, pressing me convulsively as if afraid to lose me. "My penis, which seemed to wish to give its own answer, wriggled within his body. I looked deep into his eyes. "'Do you think it would have been pleasanter to be now lying in the slush of the river?' "He shuddered and kissed me, then eagerly,—'How can you think of such horrible things just now; it is real blasphemy to the Mysian god.'

• 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)

  amb. I feel like from Jodie I have learned that it is worthwhile to invest in the quality version of the thing you actually need. Like a perfect omelet pan. Or an anti-Zionist home bubbly water machine. Like the pleasures of aiming for perfection in how home feels. And that if you want the ocean, you should go to the ocean. And from Dani I have learned a lot about the pleasures of care, of family. The love and care she brought to her aunt through her cancer, finding ways to ease her pain and focus on her joy … and the pleasure of motherhood, the absolute massive love I get to witness Dani give in how she cares for keeping the world clean and healthy for her child, it’s amazing. Also the pleasure of being effortlessly fly, I have relaxed so much more into my fashion by witnessing the breezy Dani ways. AMB. We are also committed to making the best life we can for our next generation of nibblings and babies. Can you talk about what this space makes possible for your parenting/auntie work? Jodie. I fell in love with my first nibbling by love before they were born, and I was committed to Noah from the jump. Noah was ten when I first met adrienne, and our friendship provided a space where I could share the shape and meaning of this relationship. Noah has always been a source of joy, inspiration, and wonder. Adrienne and my first bio nibblings were born within a month of each other—one of our many life parallels. Sharing that phase of our lives has been incredibly validating. Woedom honors my role in all of my families, and that acceptance is like sunshine and water to the beautiful garden that is my network of intimacy and relationships. amb. Yes, and it has helped to have this other familial space in which to check in around stuff—to understand especially around boundaries of auntiehood. We are lucky that our nibblings are being raised by people who we are mostly aligned with in terms of their choices. And then Dani, watching Dani choose and move toward her child. All of us falling in love with her before she existed. Jodie. Watching Dani choose motherhood and be blessed with her child has been one of my greatest joys. Having Dani’s back and supporting her dignity amidst the demands of parenting is a privilege. Watching her daughter grow and cheering on her best life is a gift from the gods. Dani’s an incredible mother, and I am so grateful that she is writing about how we raise liberated Black children in these times.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  I’d be remiss not to mention nipple hierarchy: Nipples with smaller or lighter areolas are considered more attractive than those with the darker, larger areolas—which often come with Black and Brown bodies, and with breastfeeding. Large and/or dark nipples are for fetish, not for beaches or titillating. It has to be said that disdain for the dark nipple feels connected to ancestral mammy memories.11 What mental calisthenics it took to apply white supremacy to navigating bodies of Black and Brown people! So it is in the face of all this complex history that I claim my/our nipples as an extension of the pleasure system in my/our bodies, directly correlating and turning up my pleasure. It was women lovers who first slowed things down to the pace of worship at my breasts, moving past my own haste to get to business, my sense of constant scarcity as a young fat Black lover who, for a long time, thought I was lucky when someone spent any time on my body. I remember the sensation that everything was connected, the first time I asked a lover to stay at my breast a little longer, the first orgasm I had from nipple stimulation alone. I began to understand a new map of nerves threading through my system, the interconnection of desire and delight threaded through the body. As far as I can tell from conversations with people of all genders, this pleasure is only numbed by our lack of belief in its existence! Now I want all people with nipples to have a chance at the nipple glory I regularly experience. Here are some steps: Touch yourself! Slow, soft, flicker, pinch, graze. Notice what produces sensation.12 Ask lovers to spend an entire session on your breasts/chest. Same thing: approach it with curiosity and try lots of different kinds of touch. Give and receive feedback. Start soft and build up sensation, pressure, pace. Use toys. I’m a fan of the Jimmy Jane form 2, which I have repurposed as a splurge of a vibrating nipple clamp. Nipple clamps are also great, just applying a consistent pressure that increases as nipples grow in arousal. Nip Pulls are also cool, using suction to increase blood flow to the nipples for heightened sensation (apply wet for best suction). Constrict the rest of the body to focus only on nipples. Hot and Heavy Homework Your pleasure assignment this week is to discover or upgrade the pleasure relationship you have with your nipples.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I stared, then felt my cheeks grow red; but he only meant, of course, the act: ‘I hear you’re working the halls together; and are quite a pair, by all accounts.’Now I smiled. ‘How did you find that out? I am very quiet about it with my family.’‘I read the Era, don’t I? “Kitty Butler and Nan King”. I know a stage-name when I see one ...’I laughed, ‘Oh, isn’t it funny, Tony? Isn’t it just the most marvellous thing? We are in Cinderella at the minute, at the Brit. Kitty’s the Prince, and I’m Dandini. I have to speak, sing, dance, slap my thigh, the works, in velvet breeches. And the crowd go mad for it!’He smiled at my pleasure - it was lovely to be allowed to be pleased with myself, at last! - then shook his head. ‘Your folks, from what I’ve heard them say, don’t know the half of it. Why don’t you have them up to see you on the stage? Why the big secret?’I shrugged, then hesitated; then, ‘Alice doesn’t care for Kitty ...’ I said.‘And you and Kitty: you’re still in her pocket? You’re still struck with her like you always was?’ I nodded. He sniffed. ‘Then, she’s a lucky girl ...’He seemed only to be flirting again; but I had the queerest impression, too, that he knew more than he was letting on - and didn’t care a fig about it. I answered, ‘I’m the lucky one,’ and held his gaze.He tapped with his pen again upon his blotter. ‘Maybe.’ Then he winked.I stayed at the Palace until it became rather obvious that Tony had other business to get on with, then took my leave of him. Once outside, I stood again before the foyer doors, reluctant to resign the reek of beer and grease-paint and confront the altogether different scents of Whitstable, our Parlour and our home. It had been good to talk of Kitty - so good that, seated at the supper-table later, between silent Alice and nasty Rhoda with her tiny, flashing sapphire, I missed her all the more. I was due to spend another day with them, but now I thought I could not face it. I said, as we started on our puddings, that I had changed my mind and would take the morning, rather than the evening train tomorrow - that I had remembered things that I must do at the theatre, that I shouldn’t put off till Thursday.They didn’t seem surprised, though Father said it was a shame.