Sex Geek

"You don’t notice the current when you’re swimming with it. It’s only when you swim against it that you realize how strong it is." - Nathaniel Rambukkana

During the bi conference, one of the workshops I co-presented was about polyamory. A bunch of people came together to create an international poly panel. There were seven of us in total - two people from the States (a kinky second-generation-poly guy from San Francisco and an "older" woman from Nashville), one from the UK, and four of us from Montreal - a longtime MF poly couple who were the founders of Montreal’s poly group, a very cool academic who’s doing his PhD thesis on monogamy and polyamory, and myself.

We called the panel "Ask Aunts Poly and the Amory Uncles" - our friend from the UK came up with that one, I believe, and we all loved it. The idea was to get a whole bunch of potentially different viewpoints together and host a 201-level Q&A session for people who were already at least somewhat experienced at doing poly. Not that there’s anything wrong with poly 101, but it’s rare (and thus precious) to find much discussion out there beyond the standard questions, like "How do you deal with jealousy?" and "How do you do time management?"

(There are, by the way, some truly excellent writings here on 101 topics and beyond. I go back and read them regularly because Franklin Veaux has articulated things so well, and I highly recommend them if you’re looking for some insight.)

Speaking of time management, I remember the first time I ever attended a poly workshop (at the 2003 bi conference), and the leader joked that the polyamorist’s mating call was, "Let me get out my agenda!" And y’know, he was right. But I digress.

Anyway, so we parked ourselves in a line at the front of the room and took questions from a room of about 25 or 30 people. It was so great. I don’t know that I’ve ever been in a room of so many poly people all at once from so many different places all at once. They were from all over Canada and the States, and other places too, some as far Australia. Wild! We went over a whole range of topics, and audience participation was really high. Totally cool.

One of the best questions of all, though, was the very last one. A woman who does not identify as poly herself asked if we could imagine a world where there was no social stigma attached to being polyamorous, and if in such a world, we would still choose to be this way or if the thrill would somehow be gone. In other words, are we poly because it’s a politically shit-disturbing thing to do and we like to get people’s backs up, or are we poly because it’s a relationship style that truly suits us? She asked it without rancour, just genuine curiosity.

I really had to think about my answer to that for a while, but I eventually did come up with one. Basically this: although I practiced it for many years quite faithfully, I have never really understood monogamy; it always felt like bending to someone else’s rules to please them even though they were full of contradictions and based on principles I didn’t really agree with. When I discovered that it was possible to have relationships in other ways that remained ethical, I took to it immediately, and I don’t think I’ll ever want to go back. Polyamory is an intrinsic part of my personal value system, and it stretches way beyond the boundaries of the way I manage who I date or sleep with or play with. It’s a life philosophy that affects my ethics in just about every interpersonal situation I can imagine - my friendships, my family, the ways I do business, the ways I manage any human situation that requires ethical thought. With this in mind, I can’t think of a world in which I wouldn’t want to function this way.

That being said, there is a political challenge inherent in this way of doing relationships, and I do enjoy that. I’d be lying if I said otherwise. It’s sort of similar to my bisexuality, in a way. I don’t necessarily have any more attraction to women than to men in theory, but if I walk down the street holding hands with a guy, chances are nobody will blink. On the other hand, if I walk down the street holding hands with a woman, people look. They react. They may smile, or give us the "gay nod," or ignore us, or gape, or become angry, or feel satisfied at queer political progress, or roll their eyes - but there’s almost always a reaction of some sort. Even the fact of taking it for granted that it’s cool or normal for two women to be holding hands on the street is a politically significant reaction in my books. And because I’m an educator, I find that very appealing. I like having everyday opportunities to make people think, to challenge them - not to alienate or piss them off but to cause reflection. So there is a definite political appeal in dating women that’s absent when it comes to dating men.

(That said, I may have to write another post soon about the very odd and thought-provoking experiences I’ve had recently with people’s reactions to me walking hand-in-hand in public with very visibly queer or gender-different men - a whole other can of worms, that.)

So of course, poly is appealing because it makes people think too. It’s a personal choice with major political ramifications, and because I’m a political person that’s got personal appeal… Just to mix it all together a little bit. No, I don’t do poly because I’m a shit-disturber. I don’t really think of myself as a shit-disturber at all - my approach is generally a lot more gentle than that. But I don’t know if I’ll ever really be able to divorce my politics from my personal life, and I kinda like it that way.

The book fetish has struck again.

I swear, I tried. I tried so hard not to let it happen! But I was in Toronto for ten days, and there are, like, five queer bookstores within a one-mile radius from the place I was staying, and… I just wasn’t strong enough!

I picked up two in the middle of the week, and thought perhaps that would be enough to sustain me: Best Sex Writing 2005 and 2006 - which are actually anthologies of writing about sex, rather than of erotic writing. Basically, they are journalistic (or other non-fiction) writings on interesting sex-related topics as published in various American media. I haven’t dived in yet, but I’m looking forward to it - sound bites of contemporary sex information, yum!

And then a bit later I picked up another book - The Pleasure’s All Mine: The Memoirs of a Professional Submissive by Joan Kelly. More on that one later - it deserves a separate post.

But the high didn’t last. And distracted though I was by time with T, Carol Queen, Midori, a couple of hot play dates and Pride weekend with a beautiful boy-dyke at my side - which is a lot of fucking distraction! - I still managed to find myself, the day before I left Toronto, holed up at Glad Day for about three hours, slowly and sensually browsing the shelves, which were packed into their tiny space in such a way that I couldn’t turn a quarter-inch without bonking into books. *sigh* It was so wonderful.

In all fairness, I went into the store with the hopes of finding a copy of Pat(rick) Califia’s Macho Sluts, which I wanted to get as a gift for someone. Sadly, it’s out of print (how could they?!), so I’ll be checking www.abebooks.com in the very near future to see if I can scare one up secondhand. (If you have never discovered ABE, please take the opportunity to do so now. They rock my world.) But of course, my quest brought me into Glad Day, and you know what happens next… it wasn’t my fault, I swear!

Please indulge me in my fetish, folks - I know books might be boring to some, but to me they are honest-to-goodness fetish objects, in that they actually do turn me on physically (don’t tell the bookstore clerks, OK?), as well as being intellectually stimulating - and to be honest I’m not even sure I can pull apart the two experiences.

I walked out with a couple of hefty tomes. One of them was a 450-page hardcover biography of Magnus Hirschfeld - Magnus Hirschfeld: A Portrait of a Pioneer in Sexology by Charlotte Wolff, of which I read thirty pages written in a deliciously dry German-inflected English academic style on the train heading back to Montreal. I can’t wait to get into the rest.

I also picked up a really interesting-looking biography of Radclyffe Hall by Sally Cline (Radclyffe Hall: A Woman Called John). Judith Halberstam included some biographical information about Hall in her book Female Masculinity, which I read and quoted in the essay I wrote this past semester comparing Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues and Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, but Halberstam only scratches the surface. It was a tease, really, so now I will be able to savour a good 300 pages just about Hall, early-1900s butch extroardinaire (or rather, invert - check under the heading "Other late 19th and early 20th century sexological terms").

I then grabbed a slim orange book by Paul Robinson entitled Queer Wars: The New Gay Right and Its Critics. Last year I read the absolutely fucking brilliant book The Trouble With Normal by Michael Warner (one of my top two reads of the entire year, the other being Judith Levine’s Harmful to Minors), which basically takes the piss out of Andrew Sullivan’s "gays are just like straights but for that pesky little homosexual attraction thing" book Virtually Normal in ways that are breathtakingly articulate. Warner’s politics are mind-blowing. Read his book. (I actually bought Sullivan’s book secondhand too, so I could see how much of it pissed me off, but haven’t read it yet.) Anyway, so this orange treasure caught my eye because it claims to make a broad analysis of the gay right vs. gay left stances, and gives the Warner/Sullivan battle as just one example thereof.

I hope to be enlightened by the time I finish it - or perhaps just to have a new set of examples of how the queer wars are actually playing out. We live in interesting times, and despite the Chinese curse to that effect, I’m actually enjoying them quite a bit.

Last but not least, I did sort of find Macho Sluts in the end - something told me I should just keep looking, and I did, even when the store clerks couldn’t find the copy they were supposed to have in stock. Eventually I flipped open a ten-dollar coffee-table book called Gay By the Bay: A History of Queer Culture in the San Francisco Bay Area, by Susan Stryker and Jim Van Buskirk, and the first page I landed on was page 10. It features a photo of the first-edition cover of Macho Sluts (very different from the edition most of us are used to with the massive bold black letters). The caption reads:

"The story of the Amazon queen of California has been well known to scholars and history buffs since the 1860s. ‘Califia’, a variant spelling of the name in Montalvo’s 16th-century romance, had become part of lesbian folklore by the 1970s. In her S/M-oriented essays and fiction, San Francisco writer Pat Califia describes modern-day Amazons every bit as fierce as the ones Montalvo imagined."

Wow. I had no idea that Patrick Califia chose his last name at all, let alone named himself after a 16th-century California Amazon. How fucking fascinating is that? And typically Califia, too, I suppose. In a way, I’m glad that was the version of Macho Sluts I ended up finding - I certainly learned more than I might have with a copy of the book itself.

Never mind that I’ll still be trying to track it down. ABE, here I come! And then to work, and then perhaps I will have time to savour another few pages of Hirschfeld before my evening’s plans.

Maybe I should think about taking vacation time one of these days to do nothing but read and jill off… oh god, the very idea! Luxury and indulgence!

The other day I wrote a lovely post about my experience at the Carol Queen panel Thursday night. Then my friend’s cat stepped on the keyboard. Apparently this is the modern equivalent of cats parking themselves on your morning paper while you try to read it. What do I know? Kitties are cute and all, but unlike most queer girls, I don’t have a raging cat fetish (more like raging cat allergies). So I picked up the little beast and leaned over to place it on the floor instead, and in the process my left boob pressed against something on the laptop, and poof! No more post. Fuck.

Okay, so the kitty won the battle, but I shall win the war! I think it’s safe to try again, because now I’m safely back home in Montreal working on my trusty desktop, and unless I suddenly acquire a feline friend in the next ten minutes or become considerably bustier in very short order, my boobs and my keyboard will not be getting in each other’s way, so random deletions are unlikely.

So here we go.

I want to be Carol Queen when I grow up. I’m sure I may have mentioned this before, or you may have guessed it by the way I rattled off even just a little part of her impressive list of credentials a couple of posts ago. Seriously, she totally rocks my world. Her writing rocked my world for years, and then I met her at the North American Conference on Bisexuality in 2003 and she rocked it with her keynote address (and briefly in person). Then last September I spent an hour yakking with her at a conference in San Francisco and she said anytime I wanted to do internship work for her she’d be happy to take me on, and I just about yelled out, "Oh my god, do you have any idea how much I idolize you and how it would be a peak life experience to spend even just another hour in your splendid company, let alone do sexuality research work at your side for weeks at a time?!!" which came out something like "Wow, that’d be great. I’ll definitely drop you a line if I manage to make it to San Francisco again for any appropriate length of time."

Needless to say, I was more than a little excited to hear she’d be in Toronto during my stay there. Thursday night, she was the star guest on a panel event entitled "Bending the Erotic: A Panel on Queer Sex Writing," which was hosted by the good people at Come As You Are. There were four other writers, all of them Canadian and all of them far less well-known, but for the most part their work was enjoyable nonetheless, particularly Sandra Alland’s poem "The Mathematics of Sex" (I think I got that title right).

But Carol was indeed the queen of the evening. When she reads, she performs her work rather than just rapid-firing it off the page - she is articulate, funny, sexy, real. It was a total treat to sit in the third row, surrounded by hot women, and listen to one of my two all-time favourite erotica writers (the other is Patrick Califia, natch) read two of my favourite pieces of her work in a richly expressive voice not ten feet away from me.

But that’s not all. The CAYA folks had kindly provided sign-language interpretation for the event. I never realized just how fucking amazing sign language is until that night. Leave it to me to be clueless about something until sex is involved, eh?

Seriously, folks. Picture this. Two very attractive women. One dark-haired, with wire-rimmed glasses, a tweed jacket, full lips and exquisitely long, delicate fingers (you do notice this sort of thing when you’re watching them sign for over an hour). One with a cascading mane of red curls and piercing blue eyes. And they took turns standing beside each author as they read and signing the entire thing.

Can you imagine how incredibly sexy it is to watch beautiful women repeatedly make the signs for things like "ass-fucking" and "lesbian" and "tight clothing" and "queer" and "cunt" and all sorts of other similarly fabulous words while your favourite author reads incredibly hot erotica? Can you imagine how compelling it is to watch talented hands dance in a silent language, with delicate precision, facial expressions to match the action, body language coming into play as they really get into the narrative? The redhead got so into some of the signing that her eyes half-closed - in fact she was so in the zone that she wound up making her own skin bleed as she repeatedly touched her own chest with her thumbnails for some of the more emphatic signs.

Now, I do the occasional French/English interpretation gig, and I know what that zone feels like - it’s as though the information is flowing into my mind in one language and I’m letting it just flow out of my mouth in another language. I stop thinking, and I’m so in tune that sometimes I almost feel like I know what the person is going to say before it comes out of their mouth. It’s exhausting work but I often do it in this weirdly meditative frame of mind, and only feel the brain drop afterwards. I read somewhere that when people do simultaneous interpretation, they use an area of the brain that is simply not ever used for anything else - maybe it’s right near the brain centre for spiritual attunement or something.

But I digress. I can analyze it now, but I can tell you I was not in a mood to pick apart comparative interpretation work processes at the time… the visuals were way too distracting. I mean holy fuck, it was amazing. I’ve never experienced anything quite like it. Watching these women do their work was sensual overstim to the highest degree. All I needed was someone licking my toes and I would have come on the spot. The interpreters added a visual expression to the well-crafted fictional action I was hearing in a way I would never have imagined to be so mesmerizing. And not only was my brain getting its sexual rocks off on the experience, but it was an intellectual/linguistic high too - it felt like watching a really well-plotted foreign porn with subtitles so I could get off and learn a new language at the same time.

Now, I’ll admit that I might, for a moment, have felt guilty that I was taking such explicit pleasure from the work of two interpreters who had really not signed up to be my erotic entertainment for the evening. So I did what any ethical voyeur should do: when I ran into them in the bathroom later, I came right out and told them how much their work had added to my enjoyment of the event, and thanked them sincerely. They were both happy at the compliment, so I guess I didn’t completely creep them out. Thank goodness!

And then to top it all off, Carol actually remembered me and came over to chat a bit at the break. I coulda died a happy woman that very moment. Instead, I bought a hardcover copy of one of her books and got her to sign it, in a moment of sheer fandom/geekiness. It’s still bringing a smile to my face as I write!

This evening, I spent a couple of hours at a professional dungeon, training one of the dominants there in my personal favourite SM technique (punching and other heavy body play). It was a thought-provoking experience. It’s only the second time I’ve been in such an establishment; the first was in Montreal, for a party I was invited to by a local prodomme. The Montreal one was on the Plateau in a reasonably commercial district. Tonight’s place, however, was a modest house in a suburb of Toronto - but every room inside has been converted to serve the needs of the pros and their customers. Deceptively sleepy on the outside, spacious and sinister on the inside. Very neat!

It’s funny - I have mixed feelings about professional domination. Much the way I have mixed feelings about sex work. In theory it’s all good; I totally agree that it’s all right for people to pay for intimate sorts of services. I mean hey, if you can see a shrink to talk about your problems, and see a massage therapist to get your muscles feeling rosy, and see an aesthetician to have your ass-crack waxed, and see a gynecologist to make sure your pink bits are in working order, and so on, and so forth - then why on earth would it not be OK to pay someone to help you get your rocks off, whether that’s via the standard suck-and-fuck or something a little more exotic involving chains and pain?

I’m also totally down with the political points that a lot of sex worker activists make - about the legitimacy of their work as real work (I am totally in favour of decriminalization), about the fact that sex work is not by its nature degrading or exploitative (though certainly the way society treats sex workers like pariahs makes it high-risk), and about the fact that if nobody should have the right to decide what a person does with his or her own body - whether right-wing neo-con or old-school feminist - then people who don’t like the idea of sex work should simply not do business with sex workers, rather than trying to limit their rights and get in their way. Y’know, much like freedom of speech - the standard argument being if you don’t like what I’m writing, don’t read it.

I guess it’s just that in real life, I’ve got a squick around the idea of making a commodity out of the sort of pleasure I experience - on both the giving and receiving ends - as being about profound personal connection and power and deep vulnerability. Anytime I’ve experienced something sexual that felt transactional, I’ve always felt kinda gross afterwards. I don’t mind the idea of paying for a lap dance, for example, but anytime I have, I haven’t really been able to get into it while it’s happening - I keep wondering if the girl is  actually enjoying herself. Is she flirting with me because she’s on the job but in reality doing her grocery list in her head while she grinds? It’s not that there’s anything morally wrong with that, but I have a hard time relaxing into an experience when I think there’s a reasonably good chance the person I’m sharing with is totally disconnected from it and from me.

I’m not a do-me queen. I like mutuality and tandem participation. Much like - to bring this into the bedroom - I don’t want someone to scream in mock ecstasy while faking an orgasm; I want to feel their body and watch their face while they experience the real thing. That’s what gets me off, in large part. It’s not that I think sex workers don’t enjoy their work - having a number of sex workers among my acquaintances, I can vouch for the fact that some of them very much do, at least some of the time. It’s that there’s no guarantee they do, and that question mark casts a big shadow on the whole idea for me.

So if we move this into a dungeon, it’s much the same thing. If I cast myself as a customer, I can perhaps see the draw in visiting a prodomme, say to have a new experience or a commitment-free scene. But I can’t see it going particularly deep for me - I don’t know that I could relax into a beating unless I clearly felt the person doing it was getting something out of the experience too, and not just potentially tacking me on to the end of a long week to pay off their phone bill.

Similarly, if I cast myself as the prodomme, I can see how it might be interesting to beat the living hell out of men for outrageous sums of money, but I can’t imagine myself into a place where that would feel like fun to me. I think it would very much feel like work. I would be meting out punishment for the sake of the cash and because I have a specialized skill or two that’s in demand within a particular market, not because of any sense of connection with the person at hand. Of course all the better if I did feel that connection - but in real life I’d want to pursue such a connection via dinner and drinks and more play and possibly eventually sex or a serious relationship, whereas I’d never do that with a client (even in my actual field of freelance employment, which is not at all related to sex) because it’s really important to maintain professional boundaries. So what would be the point? Either no connection or connection that’s effectively un-pursuable. Sounds like it’d be an exercise in boredom and potential frustration, with a nice cash bonus to make up for it. Can’t say the idea is very appealing.

I guess, for me, a big part of the thrill of sex and of SM is the knowledge that a person wants to be doing it with me. So if I’m paying them, how do I know they don’t just want my cash? It takes the central dynamic that works for me out of the equation. In my SM, I want to feel valued and desired - either because someone thinks it’d be hot to beat me (I’m not a screamer, but I’m happily responsive!), or because they think it’d be hot to surrender to the experience I can provide them. Ultimately it’s quite narcissistic, I suppose.

Professionally, while it’s nice if my editing and translation clients like me, I ultimately don’t care, so long as they’re paying me appropriately to do the work I promised them. It can be a completely dispassionate relationship, and in fact some of the best ones work exactly that way. It’s a bonus if the work is interesting, but even if it’s boring I’ll do it because they’re paying me to, and I certainly hold no great expectations that my clients will give me work I find thrilling in any way. It’s a bonus if I get along well with a client, but I’ll happily work for monosyllabic grunters if they want to pay me, so the relationship is hardly the number-one factor here. I may feel satisfied at a job well done, but it’s an intellectual sort of satisfaction, or possibly a practical one along the lines of, "Hey! That contract just paid for this month’s rent!"

But I don’t think I’m able to place sex and SM in quite that cold a container… to me, sex and BDSM are expressions of power dynamics or sexual attractions that are deeply satisfying to all involved in ways that go far beyond the transactional.

I’m happy if people do find ways for sex work and professional domination to be satisfying, whether on the giving or receiving end of either one. Equally, I think it’s completely fine if people can do these things in a way that is transactional and feel good about it afterwards - I may not understand it but I certainly don’t look down on it. I suppose it just makes the most sense for me personally to stick with training the dommes who like my style of play, and letting them whack the clients for pay, rather than trying to get in on the business myself.

It’s too bad, really. On the rare occasions where I’m desperate for cash, it might be nice to yank out a flogger for an hour and walk away two hundred bucks richer. But I suppose to each their own, and at least I know where my limits lie.

One more thing about Toronto that absolutely kicks ass… they have the Gay Geeks.

Picture it: I’m standing on the street for the Pride parade two years ago or thereabouts, and what should I see but a sizeable bunch of bespectacled beauties carrying signs that read "I wear my pants high" and "I make passes at girls who wear glasses" and "I wear a pocket protector" and so forth. Needless to say I was completely enthralled.

Fast-forward to my own geek identity questioning (which I’ve mentioned here more than once), and then to me, by complete coincidence (or not?) making friends with none other than the Gay Geeks group moderator, who just happens to be friends with my partner T (who is very much a geek indeed) and several of my other queer and geeky friends. In fact I’m currently writing on her computer, since I am staying at her place in Toronto the Beautiful.

And then last night she asked if I’d like to join the group. Ta-daaam! I felt the violins swell. I said, as per my usual, "But I’m not really a geek." She answered, rather dismissively, "Yes you are." But, in a dazzling move of geeky gallantry, she then proceeded to prove it by pulling out none other than the People’s Guide to J.R.R. Tolkien (and how geeky is that?), and quoting to me directly from an essay therein entitled "Are We Not Geeks?" (haha!), the following illuminating passage, which she had gone so far as to highlight (and how geeky is that too??):

"My own definition of geeks is this: people who care about a subject or system so much that they’re willing to learn how to master it, whether anyone else cares about it or not."

Wow.

The essay goes on to say, "The larger group of non-geeks is always going to be nervous of somebody who resists the easiest form of social control, which is shame. In their eyes, you should be able to laugh at somebody and tease them for being different, and that should be sufficient to make them toe the line and make a bit more of an effort to appear similar to everyone else. Geeks resist that, because, well, it’d mean giving up the things that matter more than conformity."

Gee. Switch "geek" to "queer" in that paragraph, and all of a sudden the connection is astoundingly simple. Perhaps I am beginning to understand why it is that most geeks I know are among the most non-homophobic people on the planet.

Does Montreal have gay geeks? Certainly we do, but nothing quite so organized as the Toronto contingent. Apparently the group is not meant to be exclusive to TO, but the interest and demographics are such that it’s kind of ended up that way. Hmf. I guess I’ll just have to be the shit-disturbing Quebecer of the bunch. Maybe I can start an exciting thread about the intricacies of language politics! Whee!

Wow. How many days have I gone without a post now? At least a week, I believe. Well, it has been quite the busy week, so I suppose that makes sense!

Okay, I have a confession to make. A very un-Montrealer-like confession. Perhaps bordering on traitorous, really. But please bear with me…

I’m starting to really like Toronto.

I’m sorry! I know! Sacrilege, blasphemy! But seriously, people - I don’t know if I just picked a totally perfect ten days to spend here, or if the place is always like this, but damn, there’s just so much cool stuff going on and so many cool people here!

For starters, we had the Pussy Palace last Thursday night. For those who’ve never experienced this particular phenomenon, allow me to explain: women take over a gay bathhouse for a full night, from 8 p.m. to 4 a.m., once every few months or so. There are all kinds of theme rooms - the Temple Priestess room (whose resident was explained to me as being "a do-you queen rather than a do-me queen"), a domination room (in which I did a shift and got to torture four or five willing victims - nummy), a lap-dance room, an ass-play room, a sling room, a "chicks with dicks" room (where girls strap it on for the pleasure of whomever wishes to enjoy them), a massage room and more. This in addition to a whirlpool, a steam room, an outdoor swimming pool and all sorts of private rooms where people can get up to deliciousness. The event was a smash. I’ve never experienced anything quite like it before.

Do we have this in Montreal? Noooo, we do not. I wonder if we could make it work here. (Yes, the wheels are turning, but don’t go getting any big expectations of me, OK? That shit’s a lot of work to put together!)

Friday, Saturday and Sunday, the 9th International Conference on Bisexuality took place. It was fantastic. Seriously, one of the better conferences I’ve attended in a long time. There was an amazing line-up of workshops and a ton of fun events - a Friday-night dance, a bunch of different Saturday-night parties (a fetish night and a "silent party" during which people flirted with each other via written notes, just for starters), a film screening (Three of Hearts, a totally sweet documentary about a MMF triad in New York) and more. The best part of my experience, though, was just enjoying the good energy among the attendees. People were friendly and helpful, discussions took place in really respectful ways… it all just felt so incredibly positive. Yay! Not to mention, the two workshops I co-ran went super smoothly. The discussion in the polyamory panel was top-notch - it was awesome to work with people from three different countries and a wide variety of poly styles and backgrounds, and come together to discuss issues of common concern. And the facilitated discussion on the intersections of bisexuality and BDSM was also lots of fun - how cool to get thirty bisexual kinksters from all over the world in one spot to discuss things. Neato!

Has Montreal ever hosted an international bi conference? Noooo. Once again, folks… don’t look at me.

But that’s not all. Saturday afternoon, Laura Antoniou was in town to give a workshop about D/s protocol. I haven’t actually read any of her books, but they’re so well-known and universally loved in the kink world that I’ve actually ordered her entire Marketplace series in one shot. Basically she’s really into dominant/submissive dynamics both in real life and in her fiction writing. From her reputation I expected someone clipped and poised and articulate, but in real life she’s more like a rumpled, loud, no-bullshit dyke with a totally razor-sharp sense of humour. I’ve never heard anyone talk about protocol with such casual logic - she seems to be completely unimpressed with anyone who takes themselves too seriously, and that is a rare thing indeed among people who enjoy such things. She’s so neat! Plus… she gave me lots of ideas. Heh heh.

Has Laura Antoniou ever come to Montreal? Nuh-uh.

Then on Sunday night, I was treated to my third experience of hearing Leslie Feinberg speak. Ze is the author of the classic Stone Butch Blues, which I know I blogged about at least a little bit during this past semester since I was reading it (for the fourth time) for class. Ze has very recently published Drag King Dreams, which I have also blogged about (and now own without having read yet). Technically this talk was a promo opportunity for the book, I believe, but in reality it was another opportunity for Leslie to get on stage and rile everyone up by ranting (in an extremely inspiring and articulate way) about the intersections of oppression across genders and sexualities and many other considerations. Ze is a total firebrand, and hir background as a union rally speaker shows loud and clear.

I came out feeling much as I have the first two times I heard hir speak - I’m unfailingly impressed with the amount of inspiration I can take out of a single two-hour talk, and unfailingly hungry for some more practical analysis of why collaboration doesn’t always come so easily to groups whose causes may intersect. I really like Leslie’s ability to bring people together for causes and encourage them to work together, but I consistently feel like ze doesn’t address the need to better understand the reasons why that doesn’t always happen, or happen easily - many of which have to do, in my opinion, with underprivileged groups oppressing each other. Y’know, racist queers, visible minorities who don’t take into account the needs of the dis/abled, anti-Semitic feminists, union organizers who are anti-sex-work, and so forth. Being a part of an oppressed group does not automatically remove one’s abilty to serve up the same dish to another group, much though I’d like it to be otherwise. The world isn’t so black and white as good guys vs. bad guys, sadly - many of us are in different camps depending on the day and the issue at hand, and that sometimes comes from a place of hostility and sometimes from a place of sheer obliviousness.

But on a less overtly political note, let me see if I can convey my most salient observation from Leslie’s talk. To put it bluntly: Toronto dykes and trannyboys are so fucking hot they make my eyeballs ache. Okay, surely in the city there are also lots of dykes who aren’t hot, but damn, the Leslie crowd was eye candy extraordinaire! And it was really obvious that everyone there had dressed up for each other. The butch girls and trans boys all had freshly barber-shopped haircuts, perfectly chosen shirts, leather pants, their sexiest jeans, suspenders, ties. The girlie girls were all in very flattering dresses with perfect lipstick and beautifully coifed hair. Basically, the Feinberg talk was clearly a cruising ground for the local intellectuo-political queer set, and the resulting energy in the room was at such a high buzz that I could barely focus on Leslie’s talk because I was too busy rubbernecking every time another perfect specimen of queer pinup god/dess went by.

God, but I love being part of a community whose idea of a hot pickup joint is a genderqueer lecture, and whose idea of beauty is a hybrid aesthetic featuring elements of old-school butch-femme, leather daddy, geek, pierced and tattooed faux-hawk punk, prep school student and rockabilly slut. Love it love it love it.

And has Leslie Feinberg ever come to Montreal? Well… actually, yes. My first experience of Leslie in person was in fact part of Queer McGill’s Dyke Days or something of the sort, in 2003 if I remember correctly. So OK, we’re even on this count.

This coming week, however, features a panel on queer erotic writing, headlined by none other than Carol Queen, one of my all-time idols - former sex worker, sex advisor for Good Vibrations (women/queer-friendly sex toy store in SF), author of the single best erotic novel ever published (The Leather Daddy and the Femme) as well as numerous amazing short stories, creator of the "Bend Over Boyfriend" series of instructional videos for girls who want to butt-fuck their boys, sexologist extraordinaire and founder of San Francisco’s most excellent Center for Sex and Culture, where I want to work in an alternate life. I’ve been so fortunate as to meet her twice - in San Diego and San Francisco - but I’ve never known her to appear on the East Coast, let alone in Canada. And here she is, showing up in good ol’ Hogtown to talk about exactly what I am most interested in hearing from her, exactly the week I happen to be here.

And then on Friday, Midori’s giving a workshop here entitled "Pushing the Psychological Edge," which from what I hear involves her terrifying her demo bottoms with things such as mealworms, chainsaws and electrical shock devices. Should be an educational evening. (In fact she’s here all week teaching all kinds of stuff, but I haven’t yet figured out how to clone myself, and Friday night’s session was most appealing.) Of course Midori is going to be in Montreal in July, so Toronto certainly has no exclusive claim to her.

And then there’s Pride. And of course Montreal has Pride too, so I can’t compare the two on those grounds either. But I can bitch about Montreal’s lack of queer bookstores (Toronto has at least five that I like to hit every time I come here - Glad Day, This Ain’t the Rosedale Library, and the Toronto Women’s Bookstore, for starters), queer-friendly sex toy stores (Toronto sustains two of the sort I like, Come As You Are and Good For Her, and several other mildly less impressive ones) and Fluevog shoe stores (the coolest, queerest shoes you ever did see - oh, pardon me, was my shoe fetish showing?).

Okay, so it’s not like Montreal is a yawning pit of emptiness when it comes to queer culture. Far from it. I just feel like I’m getting a quintuple-dose here in the space of a mere ten days, when my opportunities back home don’t seem to come nearly as thick and fast. Ah well - rather than comparing, perhaps I’ll just enjoy the differences, and visit TO more often in the future.

In the meantime, I’ll sign off and crash so that I have enough energy to enjoy it all.

My annual lover, M, is visiting Montreal for the first time. Last night, he and I and my honey, T, spent some time in the company of the local poly group. It was fun, and thought-provoking in a sort of mild musing way.

It’s odd to realize that people like us - bi/queer, poly in one form or another, kinky and/or kink-friendly - make up a strangely invisible population, but that we can move between cities and even countries with relative ease through networks of like-minded people. Sort of like dykes. We recognize each other, we share a culture. We don’t necessarily all see the world exactly the same way, but it’s as though we speak the same language, or some relatively similar dialects.

So M fit right into the bunch here. The group met at a café and walked to a park, and before long there was a big cuddle-puddle of us hanging out, yakking about poly stuff, and giving each other foot rubs. I saw a few passing cyclists do double takes - why is that guy rubbing that other guy’s back? is that girl cuddling with that other girl and that boy? - and certainly M, T and I got a few funny looks as we walked along the bike path back to my place, hand in hand in hand. But we were happy in our little poly bubble.

I did discover a few things, mind you. First of all, if you’re going to sit on the grass and get each of your feet rubbed by different cuties at the same time, it really helps to have a third cutie sitting behind you so you have something to lean against. Second, if you’re going to hold hands with two people at once, it really helps if you have a third friend with a bicycle basket to put your purse in, otherwise it’s going to whack one of your hand-holders constantly as you walk.

Really, I think polyamory sort of feeds on itself - the more cuddle buddies you have to manage, the more you need to help out with the logistics.

The other odd thing I realized is how much my world revolves around dykes and how heavily I identify with them. Sometimes, it’s the contrast that brings these things to the fore. My social world is populated with ‘em; they’re the first people I look to for community, friendship, love, sex. The experience of walking hand-in-hand with two boys made me think how very heterosexual I must have been looking on the outside (albeit a kind of oddly plural heterosexual) and how totally wrong that impression was.

I’m not honestly sure how many people in the world would have been able to accurately read what was going on. "Of course, Mabel, couldn’t you tell? The one in the middle is a kinky bi-dyke with femme tendencies - see, short hair, multiple ear piercings, leather cuff, high-heeled sandals. The flaming fag on the left, the one with the cowboy boots and the really loud shirt and the great ass, is her out-of-town bi boy, and he may or may not also be lovers with the sweet-looking mild-mannered long-haired hippie geek on the right, who’s in an LTR with the girl." Yeah, right. Like that’ll ever happen!

M leaves tomorrow for a trip to Europe, and T and I take off to Toronto for a week of bi conferencing, family and friend visiting, after which he comes back to Montreal and I immerse myself in lesbians for Pride. All of which should be a load of fun, and give me plenty to write about.

In the meantime, I’m taking my hottie lover out to the Village to check out the local guys. Now that’s my kind of date, and there ain’t nothin’ heterosexual about it.

The first time I heard Ernie Klein’s spoken-word piece, "Nerd Porn Auteur," I just about cried I laughed so hard. And it’s worked for me every time since. Any guy who waxes lustful about "brainy articulate bookworms with Mensa cards in their purses and chips on their shoulders," and who wants to make porn films in which "the women won’t even have to get naked, they’ll just take the guys into the basement and beat them repeatedly at chess"… and who makes room for gay nerd porn in his list of ideas to boot… well, much respect to him.

In my experience, smart people are just a whole lot more fun in bed. Maybe it’s the exploding creativity ("hmmm… that tuning fork could perhaps double as a…"); maybe it’s the analysis skills ("if I do that, and she likes it, perhaps I should extrapolate to do this and this and THIS…"); maybe it’s just that I like the entertainment value of people who can use big words when they talk dirty to me. My body likes stimulation, but my mind craves it, and if you can add ‘em together the enjoyment is just so much more well-rounded. Certainly brains are no guarantee of a good lay - y’know, sensitivity, libido, personal hygiene and so forth usually help - but they’re a very good start indeed.

Too bad Ernie’s not my idea of cute. I definitely like the boy’s brain.

Someone posted to a list I’m on about the current poll being conducted by Advocate magazine. The question is, "Do you think an abbreviation like LGBT or GLBTQ, etc., should replace the use of the phrase gay and lesbian?"

What a stupid question. Should the term "clothes" replace the use of the word "shirt and tie"? No. Of course not. They aren’t the same thing - related but hardly equivalent. If you’re talking about your wardrobe, though, would it not make sense to have more words than only "shirt and tie" at your disposal to describe it? Yes, of course. 

I hate it when people reduce this kind of thing to a "yes-no-undecided" range of answers. It’s frustratingly reductionist and painfully inadequate to actually begin any attempt to explore the issues at hand anyway.

So I answered the poll, and I checked "undecided," and in the comments section I wrote the following:

One does not replace the other. They refer to different things. Gay and lesbian means gay and lesbian. Gay and lesbian doesn’t include bisexuals (like myself), trans people, intersex people, genderqueers and many other groups that simply aren’t gay or lesbian, but who share community space with gays and lesbians and whose concerns overlap with those of gays and lesbians. If we’re only talking about people who are actually gay and lesbian, of course let’s not add in a bunch of extra letters. If, on the other hand, we are talking about a wider spectrum of people, then let’s use the appropriate words for all of them, and abbreviate them to BLGTQ or whatever else is accurate in a given context. And let’s do it without tokenism or other empty attempts at political correctness. The letters don’t mean much if they aren’t backed up with inclusiveness in practice. But as for usage - it’s really just a question of accuracy.

And I remembered why it is that I generally don’t bother buying the Advocate in the first place.

Just realized I should post a follow-up, since I harped on it for two weeks beforehand… for those of you who didn’t make it, the Gay Line event kicked ass. I’m so happy with how it turned out. Let’s see if I can give a rundown and make you feel like you were there. (I originally wrote "quick rundown" but this isn’t exactly short - apologies to those who prefer sound bites.)

First of all, Cocktail is a totally gorgeous space - you know, the kind with a hardwood bar so slick it gleams, delicious leather seating you just want to smell all night (hm, maybe that’s just me) and five-foot-tall exotic flowers on the piano that look like they might want to eat you for breakfast. And the manager is a charming and exquisitely helpful guy named Marcel. He ran around making sure everything was perfect all night long and was just exceedingly nice to me. Perfect example: I had about two and a half seconds’ worth of a panic attack when I realized that I’d forgotten to arrange for napkins - just enough time to turn around and see him walking towards me with an armload of ‘em, which he set down with a flourish. "I noticed you needed these." God, where do people like this come from?

Anyway, atmosphere was a good start, but the speakers - now that’s what shone. I only wish I could have cloned myself so that the inner geek wouldn’t have been quite so much at war with the inner organizer. I wanted to sit in a state of intellectual rapture and take notes, because they really were a stellar cast. But I had to MC the thing and give thank-you gifties to each of the speakers and time-check them so they wouldn’t go too far over their ten-minute max and make sure the next ones were ready to go up and arrange for the microphone to work and the lighting to be on and so forth. So that meant I spent most of the speeches running around (if only on the hamster wheel in my head) and not listening as closely as I might have liked. Plus, every ten minutes I had to get up on stage myself and do the whole thank-you/intro bit in a mishmash of both English and French. Bummer.

But what I did catch was truly wonderful. Let’s see… First we had Frank Remiggi, who has done all sorts of interesting research on the places gay guys have been congregating in Montreal over the last century. It was really cool to hear him lay the groundwork for the rest of the talks by reaching back as far as the 1920s and explaining how the current Gay Village came to be - basically a strange combination of police raids, politics and entrepreneurship, plus of course the eternal desire for social space and sex (and alcohol).

Then Line Chamberland got up and gave the absolute coolest talk - she’s an academic who’s done research work on lesbian bars, but instead of talking facts, she told a story. She spoke in the second person - "You did this, you did that" - and immersed us in a typical night at a lesbian bar in the 1950s, with butch-femme rules firmly in place, heterosexual voyeurism a basic fact of lesbian socializing, and barroom brawls commonplace in a high-tension time. Wow. So awesome. I saw heads nodding around the room and the occasional cheer when a name was mentioned or a bar referred to. What a trip.

Next up was Miriam Green, who co-founded Gay Line with Bruce Garside, who was apparently a mover and shaker in the gay world at the time. She spoke eloquently about living in San Francisco with her husband, having tons of gay friends, and then coming back to Montreal and encountering the crying need for support services that nobody was equipped to provide. I think what most impressed me about her was her perseverance in wanting to provide these services when she was greeted with great suspicion on the part of gay men but especially lesbians. Of course there was good reason to be suspicious - at the time most queer folks’ experiences with social workers or psychologists were negative at best and horrendously abusive at worst. But wow - for a straight chick to press on through that and work to win people’s trust - that takes something special. I think it would do all of us good to remember that some of Montreal’s very first queer-positive services were in large part started by a hetero ally.

The fourth speaker was Johanne Cadorette, who’s just a ton of fun every time she gets behind a microphone. She focused her talk on the queer scene in the 90s, where tension between different groups (gay vs. lesbian in particular) was high and L’Androgyne, Montreal’s sadly defunct queer bookstore, was in the second half of its 30-year existence. L’Androgyne played a defining part in my own life, and I miss it sorely, so hearing her talk about what it was like as a newly out lesbian to work there for what ended up being six or seven years of her life - aah. Like a breath of fresh air. She spoke a lot about how the separatist politics of the time weren’t necessarily a negative thing, but a way for groups to build strength, and a phase that led directly to today’s greater inclusion.

We had a little drinkie break after Johanne, and people dove into the Blue Monday food so fast that I managed to snag a piece of cantaloupe and one carrot stick before getting distracted and missing out on the rest of it.

In the second half, the first person to speak was Marie Marcelle of the Association des transsexuel/le/s du Québec. She was wonderful - more so than I even knew when I asked her to come and speak. She gave a brief history of transsexuality as a whole, and then talked a lot about MTF performers in bars and cabarets in the last few decades - a precarious life full of random arrests and violence. I didn’t know she was one of the people who founded Café Cléopâtre, along with Lana St-Cyr - how fucking cool is that! For those who don’t know it, Cleopatra is one of the city’s oldest cabaret bars - perhaps the oldest, in fact - smack on the corner of Ste-Catherine and St-Laurent in the red-light district. The downstairs is a more-or-less standard strip joint, and the upstairs features regular nightly performances by drag queens and transwomen. The few times I’ve been, I’ve enjoyed it immensely. Talk about living history!

Then Michael Hendricks came up and spoke. I’m really glad he had planned and written his whole talk - he told me ahead of time that he’d timed himself at exactly ten minutes, and man, that was impressive, because he packed one helluva lot of information into those ten minutes, complete with dates and names. I have since encouraged him to write his memoirs, because holy cow, has this guy ever been an intrinsic part of queer activist victories in Montreal, Quebec and Canada as a whole.

He talked about how he was inspired to join ACT-UP to do AIDS activism when one of his friends informed him at a party that he and his partner were the only HIV-negative people in the room. He talked about his lonely struggles towards same-sex marriage recognition (he and his partner René LeBoeuf really did go it alone for a long time before anyone else jumped on the bandwagon). And he finished off with a list of four goals he’d like to see prioritized in queer activism in the future. Now that, in my mind, is the mark of a true activist - at age 65, in a talk about history, he still found a way to frame his concerns for the future, and they’re still on the progressive edge: sexuality and anti-homphobia education in elementary schools, fair treatment of sex workers and more. Dang. He blew me away.

He was followed by Nancy Leclerc, who talked about the birth of Montreal’s bi groups and took the opportunity to do some general education about biphobia and bi people’s experiences - a welcome addition, as I imagine many people in the room hadn’t heard that point of view. Yay for diversity!

And last but not least, the guy with the greatest outfit of them all (full leathers - yummmm), André Patry. Now here’s another person that I thought would make for a good speaker, but I didn’t realize when I booked him just how awesome he would be. I asked him to come talk about the history of the gay leather community, because of a two-minute conversation we’d had at L’Aigle Noir last summer during which he said something about how AIDS had decimated the community fifteen years ago. Little did I know he was one of the founders of Montreal’s leather world, and one of the sole survivors of the epidemic when AIDS did hit. He talked about having photos of himself with 20 other men and being the only one still alive today.

It wasn’t until the next day, when my friend D reflected that to me in my own terms, that I really understood what that must have been like. She said, "Imagine the Unholy Army, your tribe, your closest friends, the people you play with and explore with. Imagine that photo we took at an event a couple of years ago," (about 20 of us in full leathers and corsetry), "and imagine that every one of us is dead except you." She might as well have punched me in the stomach.

Anyway, he too had amazing stories to tell - among others a hilarious anecdote about a convention with 21 big tough-guy men’s leather groups, during which a delegate from each of the groups was selected for a role in a live production of A Chorus Line. Good god. What a mental image. And he too concluded with his vision for the future - in fact, he’s working on that very future right now, having created a fetish group called Légende Urbaine / Urban Legend which is welcoming to people of all genders and all kinks, not just gay men. Hey, someone pinch me - am I dreaming?! Where do I sign up?

Anyway, I am completely thrilled to have brought all these amazing people together to tell their stories, which have clearly overlapped and intertwined, not only affecting one another in the past but building what we’ve got today and shaping what will come in the future. It was an honour to share a stage with them and I am totally stoked at the wide range of people who showed up to hear what they had to say - people whom I doubt usually spend time in the same space together. What a fucking great night.

The only problem is that I think I may have actually created a project for myself with this event that I never really had in mind. It feels to me like ten minutes apiece is barely scratching the surface - I can’t believe how short it felt to have them each only give a few anecdotes about their knowledge and their past. It feels to me like this was a beginning. We need oral histories from these folks, we need books, we need memoirs. If they "croak, or I mean go gently into that good night," as Michael Hendricks said, without recording the amazing richness of their experience, then we’ll all lose out in the end. I didn’t get into this to take on a new mission, and I can’t promise that I will even now, but I can’t shake this feeling like I’ve opened a door in my own mind that won’t be closing anytime soon…

In the meantime, while I decide what to do about this, I will finish off by wishing a happy 30th anniversary to Gay Line one last time. It’s pretty awesome to be a piece of that history.