Realization

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 Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  Things eased up once we hit the highway, and the taxi dropped us off in front of the embassy, where a pair of smartly dressed Marines nodded in greeting. Inside the courtyard, the clamor of the street was replaced by the steady rhythm of gardening clippers. My mother’s boss was a portly black man with closely cropped hair sprinkled gray at the temples. An American flag draped down in rich folds from the pole beside his desk. He reached out and offered a firm handshake: “How are you, young man?” He smelled of after-shave and his starched collar cut hard into his neck. I stood at attention as I answered his questions about the progress of my studies. The air in the office was cool and dry, like the air of mountain peaks: the pure and heady breeze of privilege. Our audience over, my mother sat me down in the library while she went off to do some work. I finished my comic books and the homework my mother had made me bring before climbing out of my chair to browse through the stacks. Most of the books held little interest for a nine-year-old boy—World Bank reports, geological surveys, five-year development plans. But in one corner I found a collection of Life magazines neatly displayed in clear plastic binders. I thumbed through the glossy advertisements—Goodyear Tires and Dodge Fever, Zenith TV (“Why not the best?”) and Campbell’s Soup (“Mm-mm good!”), men in white turtlenecks pouring Seagram’s over ice as women in red miniskirts looked on admiringly—and felt vaguely reassured. When I came upon a news photograph, I tried to guess the subject of the story before reading the caption. The photograph of French children dashing over cobblestoned streets: that was a happy scene, a game of hide-and-go-seek after a day of schoolbooks and chores; their laughter spoke of freedom. The photograph of a Japanese woman cradling a young, naked girl in a shallow tub: that was sad; the girl was sick, her legs twisted, her head fallen back against the mother’s breast, the mother’s face tight with grief, perhaps she blamed herself …. Eventually I came across a photograph of an older man in dark glasses and a raincoat walking down an empty road. I couldn’t guess what this picture was about; there seemed nothing unusual about the subject. On the next page was another photograph, this one a close-up of the same man’s hands. They had a strange, unnatural pallor, as if blood had been drawn from the flesh. Turning back to the first picture, I now saw that the man’s crinkly hair, his heavy lips and broad, fleshy nose, all had this same uneven, ghostly hue.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  He seemed to say it guilelessly enough; but as he did so I saw Tootsie smile and give a sideways glance at Percy - and, worse! saw Kitty blush and turn her face away - and all at once I understood what they all knew, and cursed to think I had not guessed it sooner. A half-hour later, when Walter presented himself at the parlour door, offering a gleaming cheek to Kitty and crying ‘Kiss me, Kate!’, I didn’t smile, but only bit my lip, and wondered.He was a little in love with her; perhaps, indeed, rather more than a little. I saw it now - saw the dampness of the looks he sometimes turned upon her, and the awkwardness of the glances which, more hastily, he turned away. I saw how he seized every foolish opportunity to kiss her hand, or pluck her sleeve, or place his arm, heavy and clumsy with desire, about her slender shoulders; I heard his voice catch, sometimes, or grow thick, when he addressed her. I saw and heard it all, now, because - it was the very reason that had kept me blind and deaf to it before! - because his passion was my own, which I had long grown used to thinking unremarkable, and right.I almost pitied him; I almost loved him. I did not hate him - or if I did, it was only as one loathes the looking-glass, that shows one one’s imperfect form in strict and fearful clarity. Nor did I now begin to resent his presence on those strolls and visits that I should otherwise have made with Kitty on my own. He was my rival, of sorts; but in some queer way it was almost easier to love her in his company, than out of it.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  I once asked my friends if they’d ever held things that gave them a spooky sense of history. Ancient pots with three-thousand-year-old thumbprints in the clay, said one. Antique keys, another. Clay pipes. Dancing shoes from WWII. Roman coins I found in a field. Old bus tickets in secondhand books. Everyone agreed that what these small things did was strangely intimate; they gave them the sense, as they picked them up and turned them in their fingers, of another person, an unknown person a long time ago, who had held that object in their hands. You don’t know anything about them, but you feel the other person’s there, one friend told me. It’s like all the years between you and them disappear. Like you become them, somehow. History collapses when you hold a hawk, just as it does for my friends with their small and precious objects. The vast differences between you and that long-dead person are forgotten. You cannot help but assume that they saw the world as you see it. And this has troubling ramifications. It is a small step from imagining you are the same as that long-dead falconer to presuming that the land you walk upon has been walked upon by people like you since time immemorial. And the ancestors falconers have chosen to imagine tend to have been a cut above the common crowd. ‘Falconry is certainly of high descent,’ wrote the falconer Gage Earl Freeman in 1859. ‘Look at the pride – the honest noble pride – of ancestry!’ When a friend countered this by saying his own love for falconry was ‘perfectly independent of any feeling for antiquity or the middle ages, for which he cared nothing’, Freeman’s response was blunt. ‘I believe he was mistaken.’ But hawks did not always grant you communion with lords and earls and kings. At Chapel Green a hawk let White feel part of the community of a pre-Reformation English village. It made him feel at home. When I was small I’d loved falconry’s historical glamour. I treasured it in the same way children treasure the hope that they might be like the children in books: secretly magical, part of some deeper, mysterious world that makes them something out of the ordinary. But that was a long time ago. I did not feel like that any more. I was not training a hawk because I wished to feel special. I did not want the hawk to make me feel I was striding righteously across the lands of my long-lost ancestors. I had no use for history, no use for time at all.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  I listened carefully to the bird outside. Yes, its song was different from the song of Surrey chaffinches I’d learned as a child. It was thinner, less complicated; seemed to cut off before it was properly finished. I thought I would like to hear Surrey chaffinches again. I thought of sad birds in soundproofed cages, and how your earliest experiences teach you who you are. I thought of the house from my dream. I thought of home. And then, with a slow, luxuriant thrill, I realised that everything was different about the house I was in. It was the hawk. I shut my eyes. The hawk had filled the house with wildness as a bowl of lilies fills a house with scent. It was about to begin. In the half-light through the drawn curtains she sits on her perch, relaxed, hooded, extraordinary. Formidable talons, wicked, curved black beak, sleek, café-au-lait front streaked thickly with cocoa-coloured teardrops, looking for all the world like some cappuccino samurai. ‘Hello hawk,’ I whisper, and at the sound she draws her feathers tight in alarm. ‘Hush,’ I tell myself, and the hawk. Hush. Then I put on my falconer’s glove, step forward and take her up onto my fist, untying the falconer’s knot that secures her leash to the perch. She bates. Bating. A ‘headlong dive of rage and terror, by which a leashed hawk leaps from the fist in a wild bid for freedom’. That’s how White described it in The Goshawk. The falconer’s duty, he explained, ‘is to lift the hawk back to the fist with his other hand in gentleness and patience’. I lift her back onto my fist with gentleness and patience. Her feet grip the glove convulsively. This perch is moving. I feel her mind grappling with novelty. But still it is the only thing I understand. I shall hold it tight. I persuade her to step onto a perch on a modified set of scales. Hawks have a flying weight, just as boxers have a fighting weight. A hawk that’s too fat, or high, has little interest in flying and won’t return to the falconer’s call. Hawks too low are awful things: spare, unhappy, lacking the energy to fly with fire and style. Taking the hawk back onto my fist I feel for her breastbone with the bare fingers of my other hand. She is plump, her skin hot under her feathers, and through my fingers I feel the beating of her nervous heart. I shiver. Draw my hand back. Superstition. I can’t bear to feel that flickering sign of life, can’t help but suspect that my attention might somehow make it stop. In the front room I sit, tuck a piece of raw steak into the glove under her scaly feet, and wait. One minute, two. Three.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  In this long vigil – White had six hours’ sleep in six days – the effects of extreme tiredness took their toll. Again and again, delirious from lack of sleep, sitting in the kitchen or standing in the lamplit barn, he lifted the fat and frightened hawk onto his fist reciting it passages from Hamlet, Macbeth, Richard II, Othello – ‘but the tragedy had to be kept out of the voice’ – and all the sonnets he could remember, whistling hymns to it, playing it Gilbert and Sullivan and Italian opera, and deciding, on reflection, that hawks liked Shakespeare best. When I was a student I took a paper on Tragedy as part of my English degree. This was not without irony, for I was comprehensively tragic. I wore black, smoked filterless Camels, skulked about the place with kohl-caked eyes and failed to write a single essay about Greek Tragedy, Jacobean Tragedy, Shakespearian Tragedy, or indeed do much at all. I’d like to write Miss Macdonald a glowing report, one of my supervisors noted drily, but as I’ve never seen her and have no idea what she looks like, this I cannot do. But I read all the same. I read a lot. And I found there were myriad definitions of this thing called tragedy that had wormed its way through the history of literature; and the simplest of all was this: that it is the story of a figure who, through some moral flaw or personal failing, falls through force of circumstance to his doom. It was the Tragedy paper that led me to read Freud, because he was still fashionable back then, and because psychoanalysts had their shot at explaining tragedy too. And after reading him I began to see all sorts of psychological transferences in my falconry books. I saw those nineteenth-century falconers were projecting onto their hawks all the male qualities they thought threatened by modern life: wildness, power, virility, independence and strength. By identifying with their hawks as they trained them, they could introject, or repossess, those qualities. At the same time they could exercise their power by ‘civilising’ a wild and primitive creature. Masculinity and conquest: two imperial myths for the price of one. The Victorian falconer assumed the power and strength of the hawk. The hawk assumed the manners of the man. For White, too, falconry involved strange projections, but of very different qualities. His young German goshawk was a living expression of all the dark, discreditable desires within himself he’d tried to repress for years: it was a thing fey, fairy, feral, ferocious and cruel. He had tried for so long to be a gentleman.

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  While Auma brushed her teeth, I prepared the convertible sofa for her. Soon she was curled up under a blanket, sound asleep. But I remained awake, propped up in a chair with the desk light on, looking at the stillness of her face, listening to the rhythm of her breathing, trying to make some sense out of all that she’d said. I felt as if my world had been turned on its head; as if I had woken up to find a blue sun in the yellow sky, or heard animals speaking like men. All my life, I had carried a single image of my father, one that I had sometimes rebelled against but had never questioned, one that I had later tried to take as my own. The brilliant scholar, the generous friend, the upstanding leader—my father had been all those things. All those things and more, because except for that one brief visit in Hawaii, he had never been present to foil the image, because I hadn’t seen what perhaps most men see at some point in their lives: their father’s body shrinking, their father’s best hopes dashed, their father’s face lined with grief and regret. Yes, I’d seen weakness in other men—Gramps and his disappointments, Lolo and his compromise. But these men had become object lessons for me, men I might love but never emulate, white men and brown men whose fates didn’t speak to my own. It was into my father’s image, the black man, son of Africa, that I’d packed all the attributes I sought in myself, the attributes of Martin and Malcolm, DuBois and Mandela. And if later I saw that the black men I knew—Frank or Ray or Will or Rafiq—fell short of such lofty standards; if I had learned to respect these men for the struggles they went through, recognizing them as my own—my father’s voice had nevertheless remained untainted, inspiring, rebuking, granting or withholding approval. You do not work hard enough, Barry. You must help in your people’s struggle. Wake up, black man! Now, as I sat in the glow of a single light bulb, rocking slightly on a hard-backed chair, that image had suddenly vanished. Replaced by … what? A bitter drunk? An abusive husband? A defeated, lonely bureaucrat? To think that all my life I had been wrestling with nothing more than a ghost! For a moment I felt giddy; if Auma hadn’t been in the room, I would have probably laughed out loud. The king is overthrown, I thought. The emerald curtain is pulled aside. The rabble of my head is free to run riot; I can do what I damn well please. For what man, if not my own father, has the power to tell me otherwise? Whatever I do, it seems, I won’t do much worse than he did.

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  So Regina was right; it had been just about me. My fear. My needs. And now? I imagined Regina’s grandmother somewhere, her back bent, the flesh of her arms shaking as she scrubbed an endless floor. Slowly, the old woman lifted her head to look straight at me, and in her sagging face I saw that what bound us together went beyond anger or despair or pity. What was she asking of me, then? Determination, mostly. The determination to push against whatever power kept her stooped instead of standing straight. The determination to resist the easy or the expedient. You might be locked into a world not of your own making, her eyes said, but you still have a claim on how it is shaped. You still have responsibilities. The old woman’s face dissolved from my mind, only to be replaced by a series of others. The copper-skinned face of the Mexican maid, straining as she carries out the garbage. The face of Lolo’s mother drawn with grief as she watches the Dutch burn down her house. The tight-lipped, chalk-colored face of Toot as she boards the six-thirty A.M. bus that will take her to work. Only a lack of imagination, a failure of nerve, had made me think that I had to choose between them. They all asked the same thing of me, these grandmothers of mine. My identity might begin with the fact of my race, but it didn’t, couldn’t, end there. At least that’s what I would choose to believe. For a few minutes more I sat still in my doorway, watching the sun glide into place, thinking about the call to Regina I’d be making that day. Behind me, Billie was on her last song. I picked up the refrain, humming a few bars. Her voice sounded different to me now. Beneath the layers of hurt, beneath the ragged laughter, I heard a willingness to endure. Endure—and make music that wasn’t there before. CHAPTER SIX [image file=image_rsrc2W2.jpg] I SPENT MY FIRST NIGHT in Manhattan curled up in an alleyway. It wasn’t intentional; while still in L.A., I had heard that a friend of a friend would be vacating her apartment in Spanish Harlem, near Columbia, and that given New York’s real estate market I’d better grab it while I could. An agreement was reached; I wired ahead with the date of my August arrival; and after dragging my luggage through the airport, the subways, Times Square, and across 109th from Broadway to Amsterdam, I finally stood at the door, a few minutes past ten P.M.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Had you forgotten?’ It was a Sunday, and Walter was coming, as usual, to take us driving. I had not forgotten - but had had no time and no desire, yet, to think of ordinary things. Now, at the mention of Walter’s name, I grew thoughtful. It would be rather hard on him, now that this had happened. As if Kitty knew what I was thinking, she said, ‘You will be sensible with Walter, won’t you, Nan?’ Then she repeated what she had said the night before upon the bridge: ‘You won’t let on, will you, to anyone? You will be careful - won’t you?’ I silently cursed her for being so prudent; but took her hand and kissed it. ‘I have been being careful since the first minute I saw you. I am the Queen of Carefulness. I shall go on being careful for ever, if you like - so long as I might be a bit reckless, sometimes, when we are quite alone.’ Her smile, when she gave it, was a little distracted. ‘After all,’ she said, ‘things have not changed, so very much.’ But I knew that everything had changed - everything. At length I rose too, and washed and dressed and used the chamber-pot, while Kitty went downstairs. She came back with a tray of tea and toast - ‘I could hardly look Ma Dendy in the eye!’ she said, all shy and red again - and we had our breakfast in our own parlour, before the fire, kissing the crumbs and butter from one another’s lips. There was a hamper of suits beneath the window, that we had had sent over from a costumier’s and not yet properly examined; and now, as we waited for Walter, Kitty began rather idly to sort through it. She pulled out a black tail-coat, very fine. ‘Look at this!’ she said. She slipped it on over her dress, and did a stiff little dance; then she began, very lightly, to sing. ‘In a house, in a square, in a quadrant,’ she sang, ‘In a street, in a lane, in a road; Turn to the left, on the right hand, You see there my true love’s abode.’ I smiled. This was an old song of George Leybourne’s: everyone had used to whistle it in the ’seventies, and I had even once seen it sung by Leybourne himself, at the Canterbury Palace.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I knew about that kind of love. I knew how it was to bare your palpitating heart, and be fearful as you did so that the beats should come too loudly, and betray you.I had kept my heart-beats smothered; and had been betrayed, anyway.And now I had betrayed another, like myself.I put away the gentleman’s sovereign, and walked to Leicester Square.This was one place which, in all my careless West End wanderings, I had tended to avoid or pass through swiftly: I was always mindful of the first trip I had made there, with Kitty and Walter, and it was not a memory I cared, very often, to revisit. Tonight, however, I walked there rather purposefully. I went to the statute of Shakespeare, where we had stood that time, and I leaned before it, gazing at the view that we had looked on then. I remembered Walter saying that we were at the very heart of London, and did I know what it was that made that great heart beat? Variety! I had looked around me that afternoon and seen, astonished, what I thought was all the world’s variety, brought together in one extraordinary place. I had seen rich and poor, splendid and squalid, white man and black man, all bustling side by side. I had seen them make a vast harmonious whole, and been thrilled to think that I was about to find my own particular place in it, as Kitty’s friend.How had my sense of the world been changed, since then! I had learned that London life was even stranger and more various than I had ever thought it; but I had learned too that not all its great variety was visible to the casual eye; that not all the pieces of the city sat together smoothly, or graciously, but rather rubbed and chafed and jostled one another, and overlapped; that some, out of fear, kept themselves hidden, and only exposed themselves to those upon whose sympathies they could be sure. Now, all unwittingly, I had been marked out by one such secret element, and claimed by it as a member.I looked into the crowds that passed me by on every side. There were three hundred, four hundred, perhaps five hundred men there.

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  If the language, the humor, the stories of ordinary people were the stuff out of which families, communities, economies would have to be built, then I couldn’t separate that strength from the hurt and distortions that lingered inside us. And it was the implications of that fact, I realized, that had most disturbed me when I looked into Ruby’s eyes. The stories that I had been hearing from the leadership, all the records of courage and sacrifice and overcoming of great odds, hadn’t simply arisen from struggles with pestilence or drought, or even mere poverty. They had arisen out of a very particular experience with hate. That hate hadn’t gone away; it formed a counternarrative buried deep within each person and at the center of which stood white people—some cruel, some ignorant, sometimes a single face, sometimes just a faceless image of a system claiming power over our lives. I had to ask myself whether the bonds of community could be restored without collectively exorcising that ghostly figure that haunted black dreams. Could Ruby love herself without hating blue eyes? Rafiq al-Shabazz had settled such questions to his own satisfaction. I had begun to see him more regularly, for the morning after DCP met with the Mayor’s Office of Employment and Training he had called me up and launched into a rapid-fire monologue about the job center we had asked for from the city. “We gotta talk, Barack,” he said. “What y’all are trying to do with job training needs to fit into the overall comprehensive development plan I’ve been working on. Can’t think about this thing in isolation … got to look at the big picture. You don’t understand the forces at work out here. Is big, man. All kinds of folks ready to stab you in the back.” “Who is this?” “Rafiq. What’s the matter, too early for you?” It was. I put him on hold and got a cup of coffee, then asked him to start all over again, more slowly this time. I eventually gathered that Rafiq had an interest in having the new MET intake center we’d proposed to the city locate in a certain building near his office on Michigan Avenue. I didn’t ask the particular nature of that interest: I doubted that I could get a straight answer out of him, and anyway, I figured that we might be able to use an ally in what was proving to be a series of sticky negotiations with Ms. Alvarez. If the storefront he had in mind met the necessary specifications, I said, then I was willing to propose it as one possible alternative.

• From Generation Anxiety: A Millennial and Gen Z Guide to Staying Afloat in an Uncertain World (2023)

  Perhaps even as you read my example, it brought a smile to your face. This is just another example of how we can collectively connect and heal when we share our happiness with others. TO THE CHILD WITHIN Even with the ideas of post-traumatic growth and gratitude, this chapter may be heavy for you. And while we may not care to admit it because we minimize our pain or it feels too hard to face, the trauma we experience, especially at a young age (as was the case for Colleen), can shape us. What’s so hard about this particular pain is that it can feel invisible—even to ourselves. We often have no conscious memories of these wounds and yet they mark our bodies and brains nonetheless. I knew this to be true in my own life when I had to acknowledge how the trauma I went through as a child impacted me still as an adult. You’re familiar by now with how I’ve grappled with emetophobia throughout my life. It’s tortured me in a variety of ways as I’ve grown up and yet, all throughout my childhood and even into early adulthood, I never knew why. It wasn’t until I was in my psychodynamic class in graduate school that it dawned on me. It was about my mom. I know, I know. A common therapy trope. But in this case, it was true. When I was about two years old, my mom was diagnosed with Stage 3 breast cancer. It turned out she had a lump in her breast before she got pregnant with me, but, even as a nurse, she was repeatedly told she was “crazy” for believing that at thirty-five years old, she could have breast cancer. Finally, after years of her seeing the lump grow, someone believed her. What happened next were years of surgeries, including a mastectomy, hair loss, chemotherapy, and, sure enough, vomiting. As I was a toddler then, I remember none of it. While my conscious memory fails, I’m told that my mom was very sick. I know she tried to shield me from her pain. In fact, I was frequently physically removed from my house to keep me from seeing her so sick. As time marched on, I never pieced together how my mom’s cancer shaped how I showed up in the world. The trauma was so deep that I couldn’t see it—I could only feel it. When you feel something almost all the time, you don’t realize that it may not be “normal.” Panic attacks, anxiety around peers, and seeking an excess amount of control was just part of my daily experience. I was unknowingly living a life of frequent aftershocks when I couldn’t remember what the actual earthquake felt like. And then that one day in class it hit me.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  I was that girl, in the camo miniskirt with the tight pink Jem and the Holograms T-shirt and no bra, short hair in a Spanish anarchist mullet and big boots. Something like Cameron Howe in season one of Halt and Catch Fire, I was that trans hacker activist girl in early transition, and when I realized it was a big deal if I took my clothes off, I did. As I was finishing my MFA in visual art, focusing on networked mixed-reality performance, around 2009, I was committed to becoming an internationally known performance artist. I was fascinated by art movements like cyberfeminism, post-porn, and netporn. With my partner, I created erotic performances online and onscreen, hacking our own electronic devices and coding our avatars to imagine new possibilities for pleasure, sexuality, and gender. I recall reading Audre Lorde’s essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” for the first time, years ago, and rejecting her claim that “to refuse to be conscious of what we are feeling at any time, however comfortable that might seem, is to deny a large part of the experience, and to allow ourselves to be reduced to the pornographic, the abused, and the absurd.” I refused to see the pornographic as negative. I was deep in denial. Now I feel the depth and truth of her claims in my own life. Lorde describes the power of erotic not only in the connection between any two people but also in so many more experiences, saying “the erotic connection … is the open and fearless underlining of my capacity for joy. In the way my body stretches to music and opens into response.”78 Her description of the erotic as a source of power, which can be distorted or misused, resonates with my experience. In my 2010 essay “Trans Desire,” published with Barbara Fornssler’s essay “Affective Cyborgs” in the book Trans Desire/Affective Cyborgs, I made an argument that I no longer agree with.79 I argued that do-it-yourself (DIY) queer porn could be a form of liberatory, biopolitical world-building. I argued that desire could be a central guide for political struggle, particularly for trans politics, in which there is no logical way to decide to transition one’s gender, given the danger of doing so and the unknowability of the outcomes. After going through medical, emotional, and spiritual transition, I feel differently now. My gender transition took almost ten years, and I understand my art practice as an important process of experimentation that led me to where I am today. Still, now I see how much of the erotic art that I did in the beginning of my career was a way to unconsciously re-create traumatic experiences I had as a young child and primarily about seeking approval and validation. The behavior was reinforced by being rewarded with attention as a performance artist.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Be safe. For some, this means condom use, for others, it might be letting someone know where you are. Indulge yourself, but not at the risk of your partner(s). Don’t be reckless. Never compromise yourself or lose control of a situation. Leah. Oh, and practice saying no. Practice getting up and leaving. Practice saying, hey, I’m not feeling it, I gotta go. These are skills we’re not taught and they are crucial. amb. Anything I didn’t ask that feels important? Leah. You can have casual sex through meeting someone at a cafe, chance meetings through friends, grinding at a party, using online modes of connection, or going to a play party. Research play parties and be aware that many of them can be very white, abled, etc. If you don’t like the sexual spaces out there, make your own! People always have, from the kind of queer male public sex Samuel Delany writes about to when queer women into BDSM started going to The Catacombs, a queer male sex club focused on fisting in San Francisco in the eighties and created a pansexual queer fisting paradise. Gary. Get tested, regularly. Be honest with your doctor about your sexual activity. Learn your limits. 23 This essay first appeared as adrienne maree brown, “The Pleasure Dome: The Highs, Lows, and Blows of Casual Sex,” July 11, 2017, Bitch Media (blog), https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/pleasure-dome/highs-lows-and-blows-casual-sex.24 Check out Leah’s “Care as Pleasure” in this book!, p. 313.25 Check out Holiday’s “Are you there, goD? It’s me, Day” in this book!, p. 153.Confessions of A Queer Sex GoddessOne of the most important areas of pleasure activism is to acknowledge and unlearn regressive beliefs inside our own pursuit of pleasure. I have been on my own journey of decolonization in the work of crafting these pages. It is embarrassing to name, but one key area of this kind of unlearning in my life has been around sex with partners of the same sex. It’s taken me most of my life to have this particular aha, that “gay sex” is not abnormal or subpar or missing something or evil or even gay. It’s just dope. It might seem quite obvious to you, or at least obvious that I would think so, since the majority of my sex life has been with nonbinary, trans, and women lovers. That just shows the depth of internalized homophobia and how deep gender social conditioning is.

• From The Art of Memoir

  shoulder. I was the one who kept quiet Mother’s dalliances with a cowboy on a Colorado vacation. I was the one about to head for the California coast. Of course, he drank like a fish, and his emotional stoicism made him the strong, silent type. And he ignored my mother’s madness in ways that didn’t protect us from her. But he never said he’d be somewhere for me and didn’t show up, and he hated like hell when I left home. That about-face took me by storm, though. I’d spent decades discussing his abandonment in therapy, and it was true he’d drunk himself off a barstool when I was just twenty-five. But the view that he’d ever left me was tacit hogwash—a convenient lie I’d told myself to salve my own guilt about leaving him. The other bubble that got burst in Cherry was the long-held conviction that I’d been supersmart as a teenager—a real brainiac. But foraging around, I found zero evidence for this. I bailed out of advanced math after tenth grade. My grades sucked—I got a D in art. For every great book I read (Anna Karenina), I took in ten crap counterculture tomes (Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice or Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book). If I wasn’t smart, where on earth did I get this idea? Well, compared to the dope dealers I hung out and later roomed with— guys who did serious prison bids and who died young (knife fight, AIDS, gunshot to the temple, carbon dioxide in the garage)—I was a genius. Mostly, though, I was a fan of eggheads—my best girl pal was the smartest in school. She and two guys I dated seriously aced the big standardized tests and sifted through scholarship offers by the mailbox full. I only posed as a smart person. But that reversal—rather than being something I’d hide—actually buffed up my material, because it exposed the schism between who I’d wanted to be and who I’d actually been. That’s the stuff of inner conflict and plot. The book had been a burr in my head for ten years. I wanted it to fill a hole I saw in the memoir canon. Not only did girls not write about sex in high school—other than assaults or aberrant sex—they

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  Yet the Upanishads also challenged the Kshatriya martial ethos. The atman had originally been Agni, the deepest, divine “self” of the warrior that he had attained by fighting and stealing. The heroic Aryan drive eastward had been motivated by desire for earthly things—cows, plunder, land, honor, and prestige. Now the Upanishad sages urged their disciples to renounce such desire. Anyone who remained fixated on mundane wealth could never be liberated from the cycle of suffering and rebirth, but “a man who does not desire—who is without desires, who is freed from desires, whose only desire is his self (atman)—his vital functions do not depart. Brahman he is and to brahman he goes.”64 New meditative techniques induced a state of mind that was “calm, composed, cool, patient and collected”: in short, the very opposite of the old agitated Aryan mentality.65 One of the Upanishads actually described Indra, no less, living peacefully as a humble student in the forest with his teacher and relinquishing violence in order to find perfect tranquillity.66 Aryans had always considered themselves inherently superior to others; their rituals had bred within them a deep sense of entitlement that had fueled their raids and conquests. But the Upanishads taught that because the atman, the essence of every single creature, was identical with the Brahman, all beings shared the same sacred core. The Brahman was the subtle kernel of the banyan seed from which a great tree grows.67 It was the sap that gave life to every part of the tree; it was also the most fundamental reality of every single human being.68 Brahman was like a chunk of salt left overnight to dissolve in a beaker of water; even though it could not be seen the next morning, it was still present in every sip.69 Instead of repudiating this basic kinship with all beings, as the warrior did when he demonized his enemy, these sages were deliberately cultivating an awareness of it. Everyone liked to imagine that he was unique, but in reality his special distinguishing features were no more permanent than rivers that all flowed into the same sea. Once they left the riverbed, they became “just the ocean,” no longer proclaiming their individuality, crying “I am that river,” “I am this river.” Such strident assertion of the ego was a delusion that could only lead to pain and confusion. Release (moksha) from such suffering was dependent on the profound acknowledgment that at base everybody was Brahman and should therefore be treated with absolute reverence. The Upanishads bequeathed to India a sense of the fundamental unity of all beings, so that your so-called enemy was no longer the heinous other but inseparable from you.70

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  At first she answered as I thought an actress should - comfortably, rather teasingly, laughing when I blushed or said a foolish thing. Gradually, however - as if she was stripping the paint from her voice, as well as from her face - her tone grew milder, less pert and pressing. At last - she gave a yawn, and rubbed her knuckles in her eyes - at last her voice was just a girl’s: melodious and strong and clear, but just a Kentish girl’s voice, like my own. Like the freckles, it made her - not unremarkable, as I had feared to find her; but marvellously, achingly real. Hearing it, I understood at last my wildness of the past seven days. I thought, how queer it is! - and yet, how very ordinary: I am in love with you. Soon her face was wiped quite bare, and her cigarette smoked to the filter; and then she rose and put her fingers to her hair. ‘I had better change,’ she said, almost shyly. I took the hint, and said that I should go, and she walked the couple of steps with me to the door. ‘Thank you, Miss Astley,’ she said - she already had my name from Tony - ‘for coming to see me.’ She held out her hand to me, and I lifted my own in response - then remembered my glove - my glove with the lavender bows upon it, to match my pretty hat - and quickly drew it off and offered her my naked fingers. All at once she was the gallant boy of the footlights again. She straightened her back, made me a little bow, and raised my knuckles to her lips. I flushed with pleasure - until I saw her nostrils quiver, and knew, suddenly, what she smelled: those rank sea-scents, of liquor and oyster-flesh, crab-meat and whelks, which had flavoured my fingers and those of my family for so many years we had all ceased, entirely, to notice them. Now I had thrust them beneath Kitty Butler’s nose! I felt ready to die of shame. I made, at once, to pull my hand away; but she held it fast in her own, still pressed to her lips, and laughed at me over the knuckles. There was a look in her eye I could not quite interpret. ‘You smell,’ she began, slowly and wonderingly, ‘like -’ ‘Like a herring!’ I said bitterly. My cheeks were hot now and very red; there were tears, almost, in my eyes. I think she saw my confusion and was sorry for it. ‘Not at all like a herring,’ she said gently. ‘But perhaps, maybe, like a mermaid ...’ And she kissed my fingers properly, and this time I let her; and at last my blush faded, and I smiled.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Like a lot of humans who get socialized in a religious context, I grew up believing in procreation as the primary purpose of sex. And I grew up thinking that the penis was the center of sex, the necessary component. Even when I began sleeping with people who didn’t have (or want to have) a penis, we would bring the penis in. We might buy one at a store and strap it to our bodies. We might just use the language—“suck my dick, lick the shaft, kiss the tip, come inside me.” Of course, I don’t mind this with transmasculine lovers, but I began to wonder why, when I was with lovers who didn’t identify with a penis in any way, we still felt the need for … a penis. I started intentionally leaving the penis out, seeing how far we could go without it. It was so far! It was further, in many cases, than I’d ever gotten with a real or fake penis. I gained a new respect for the brilliant design of my hands, how I have enough fingers for simultaneous double penetration and clitoral stimulation—and a whole other hand for nipple tweaking or hair pulling and face grabbing or ass gripping. I was also amazed at how erotic and satisfying all the variations on grinding could be, especially the holy grail of tribbing. I talked with gay cis male friends and they shared a similar experience of this phenomenon: an initial approach to the ass as if it were some alternative to a pussy, and then a recognition of the way the male body is actually structured to feel outstanding pleasure through anal stimulation. Of course, anal sex feels good to a lot of women too, even without the precious prostate. And, of course, neither fingering nor tribbing nor anal sex (nor any other kind of sex) are actually gay sex anyway.That whole limited way of thinking is evidence of patriarchy, heteronormativity, and the moralistic effort to control what happens in our bedrooms. All of this finally led to a breakthrough—“gay” sex isn’t missing anything, and it isn’t alternative, it’s just been politically attacked. For a long time. Not forever, though—there is so much evidence of gay sex in all cultures from the beginning of time. We are in an era of rejecting the rigidity and lies of authoritarian systems that aim to separate us from listening to the wisdom of our bodies in order to control us. As with so many aspects of pleasure activism, we are remembering our nature and regenerating our relationships to each other in the most natural ways. Are you there, goD? It’s me, DayHoliday Simmons Holiday Simmons is a transmasculine, two-spirit, Black and Indigenous organizer and educator based in Atlanta. Holiday is someone I've watched grow and transition, someone I've known to be open in teaching others as he learns how longing, trauma and gender have shaped him. October 2012

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  I was that girl, in the camo miniskirt with the tight pink Jem and the Holograms T-shirt and no bra, short hair in a Spanish anarchist mullet and big boots. Something like Cameron Howe in season one of Halt and Catch Fire, I was that trans hacker activist girl in early transition, and when I realized it was a big deal if I took my clothes off, I did. As I was finishing my MFA in visual art, focusing on networked mixed-reality performance, around 2009, I was committed to becoming an internationally known performance artist. I was fascinated by art movements like cyberfeminism, post-porn, and netporn. With my partner, I created erotic performances online and onscreen, hacking our own electronic devices and coding our avatars to imagine new possibilities for pleasure, sexuality, and gender. I recall reading Audre Lorde’s essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” for the first time, years ago, and rejecting her claim that “to refuse to be conscious of what we are feeling at any time, however comfortable that might seem, is to deny a large part of the experience, and to allow ourselves to be reduced to the pornographic, the abused, and the absurd.” I refused to see the pornographic as negative. I was deep in denial. Now I feel the depth and truth of her claims in my own life. Lorde describes the power of erotic not only in the connection between any two people but also in so many more experiences, saying “the erotic connection … is the open and fearless underlining of my capacity for joy. In the way my body stretches to music and opens into response.”78 Her description of the erotic as a source of power, which can be distorted or misused, resonates with my experience. In my 2010 essay “Trans Desire,” published with Barbara Fornssler’s essay “Affective Cyborgs” in the book Trans Desire/Affective Cyborgs, I made an argument that I no longer agree with.79 I argued that do-it-yourself (DIY) queer porn could be a form of liberatory, biopolitical world-building. I argued that desire could be a central guide for political struggle, particularly for trans politics, in which there is no logical way to decide to transition one’s gender, given the danger of doing so and the unknowability of the outcomes. After going through medical, emotional, and spiritual transition, I feel differently now. My gender transition took almost ten years, and I understand my art practice as an important process of experimentation that led me to where I am today. Still, now I see how much of the erotic art that I did in the beginning of my career was a way to unconsciously re-create traumatic experiences I had as a young child and primarily about seeking approval and validation. The behavior was reinforced by being rewarded with attention as a performance artist.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I had learned that London life was even stranger and more various than I had ever thought it; but I had learned too that not all its great variety was visible to the casual eye; that not all the pieces of the city sat together smoothly, or graciously, but rather rubbed and chafed and jostled one another, and overlapped; that some, out of fear, kept themselves hidden, and only exposed themselves to those upon whose sympathies they could be sure. Now, all unwittingly, I had been marked out by one such secret element, and claimed by it as a member. I looked into the crowds that passed me by on every side. There were three hundred, four hundred, perhaps five hundred men there. How many of them were like the gentleman whose parts I had just fingered? Even as I wondered it I saw one fellow gaze my way, deliberately - and then another. Perhaps there had been many such looks since I had returned to the world as a boy; but I had never noticed them or grasped their import. Now, however, I grasped it very well - and I trembled again, as I did so, with satisfaction and spite. I had first donned trousers to avoid men’s eyes; to feel myself the object of these men’s gazes, however, these men who thought I was like them, like that — well, that was not to be pestered; it was to be, in some queer way, revenged. For a week or two I continued to wander, and to watch, and to learn the ways and gestures of the world into which I had stumbled. Walking and watching, indeed, are that world’s keynotes: you walk, and let yourself be looked at; you watch, until you find a face or a figure that you fancy; there is a nod, a wink, a shake of the head, a purposeful stepping to an alley or a rooming-house ... At first, as I have said, I took no part in these exchanges, but only studied others at them, and received a thousand questing glances on my own account — some of which I held, rather teasingly, but most of which I turned aside, after a second, with a show of carelessness. But then, one afternoon, I was approached once again by a gentleman who, it seemed to me, bore some slight resemblance to Walter. He wanted my hand upon him, merely, and to have a string of lewd endearments whispered in his ears as I dubbed him off - it didn’t seem like much. If I hesitated, I don’t believe he saw. I named my terms - a sovereign, again - and led him to the nook where I had served his predecessor.

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  Off the cuff, I’ll describe some situations that used to turn me on: being picked up on the corner while hitchhiking at night and being raped by three guys; same situation, only intercourse willingly with all three; call girl with a good reputation: being seduced while under the influence of drugs; subject of sexual experiments such as in the Nazi war camps; intercourse with a dog with a friend looking on; intercourse with my brothers; sex play with my father, sisters (in the fantasies involving a mother or father, they were not my own parents; likewise the faces of siblings were changed—a point which I find interesting because I do it unconsciously); intercourse with my favorite teacher… the list goes on. Many of my early fantasies involved some sort of sadism or masochism, but after I experienced the emotional side of lovemaking these fantasies very quickly wore off. I found them really distasteful. Now I have just as many “favorite” fantasies to choose from, but they all involve emotion, whether it be love or hate. Usually gentleness surrounds the feelings of my fantasies now: being accepted in a coven of witches through their love ritual (I read that somewhere); making love with someone I’ve just met, with whom I’ve instantly gotten along really well; having an affair with my high-school teacher, which I’m sure would not be a fantasy if I gave him a little encouragement. All these fantasies are very close to reality. I’ve also had occasional lesbian fantasies. In them I am never a part of the action, but an onlooker. In the past I also had fantasies of orgies, and again I was always the passive partner. But I don’t use those anymore. Now I’m into emotion. [Letter] StephanieWhen first thinking about your request for sexual fantasies, I said to myself, “But this doesn’t apply to me, as far as I can remember I have never fantasized.” But upon reflection, I realized that I had disciplined myself to forget them. Upon wracking my brains, I realize I have fantasized but never realized I was getting a sensual thrill from it until now. After reading a book about Roman orgies, I imagined I was having intercourse with a donkey, having read an account of just such a happening. But it quickly grew distasteful. Another fantasy I’ve had several times, and usually when I’m afraid of having sexual intercourse, say after having a baby or during times of stress (am I rationalizing?), is this: I imagine myself in the jungle with a primitive tribe. I am forced to watch punishments being inflicted upon some of their tribe members for various sexual misdemeanors. I go into great detail over the tortures. The men have their penises or scrotum cut off, or red-hot liquid forced up their urethra. The women have red-hot pokers thrust up them slowly. As the only civilized person there I am duly horrified by these events.