Sex Geek

Well, after months of good intentions and no follow-through, I’ve finally done the first instalment of my lesbian homework: I watched the whole first season of The L Word last week. (You can always try the official site instead of that one, but unfortunately, it’s only intended for viewing from within the United States! Showcase, you suck!)

I know, I’m way behind the times. The series started airing almost two years ago now. Bad, bad lesbian Andrea. (Do I get away with it ’cause I’m bi?) It’s not that I had something against the idea of watching The L Word in particular. I just find most television to be dreadfully boring; when you write a story with the express idea of stretching it out to keep people watching for a full season, the quality of the story itself seems to suffer by consequence. Sort of like cartoon strips - I mean, how long can you really find Dagwood funny, honestly? This is unlike, say, a film or a novel, in which a story is told for the purpose of telling the story, be it 68 minutes or 197, be it 136 pages or 792. Of course there are bad novels and bad films out there, but rarely are they the fault of the format itself.

The other problem is that I have a hard time committing to staying home for one evening a week on a date with my television. There are always more interesting things happening elsewhere than my living room. People to do, things to see, yada yada. So although I’d heard my friends talk about The L Word, read the occasional criticism of the show (not enough butches! where are the trannies? what’s with the rich skinny girls? etc., etc.) I had only ever caught the occasional half-episode during a visit to a friend’s place here and there.

So my friend S (she of Substitute Date status) lent me season 1 on DVD in February, and I finally got my shit together and ploughed through it just last week. It was… well, I enjoyed it, but I didn’t find it to be mind-blowingly good; entertaining but fluffy. By the end of the season the characters were starting to develop some depth, and the occasional bouts of terrible writing or painfully bad acting (the stereotypically shrill Asian sperm-donor girlfriend who stalked Tina for one episode? Ouch, ouch! Make it stop!) seemed to be fading in favour of more palatable and believable drama. And it was pleasant to see that the show actually does reference real dyke culture a whole lot, instead of some network’s idea of what lesbian culture is like.

Everyone told me I’d hate Jenny, the confused bisexual character played by Mia Kirshner. Well, while she is a confused bisexual (or at least a confused something!), she didn’t particularly rub me the wrong way. I was more irritated by her habit of lying to people while aiming her huge overly-made-up puppy-dog eyes at them, and at her propensity for high school-style dramatics, than at her sexual confusion. I don’t expect every bisexual character in a work of fiction to be a perfect representation of the Ideal Bisexual, and Alice (the non-confused bisexual) is reasonably palatable, so it kinda evens out. Plus, I appreciated the way, at the end of the season, she ends up hanging out with both her male and female dates together and everyone gets along. A drama queen like Jenny is a poor candidate for polyamory in the long run, but it made for a nice warm’n'fuzzy scene in the last episode. (And the female date was pretty attractive, considering I don’t usually look twice at the long-hair types.)

Everyone also told me I’d get a real kick out of Lisa, the "lesbian-identified male" character who dates Alice for a while. I actually found him to be excessively annoying. While there was high potential for a LIM character to provide interesting fodder for gender exploration on the show, all they really did with him (her? they didn’t even make the pronoun clear!) was pile all the most irritating lesbian stereotypes onto him - he was horrendously clingy, excessively New-Agey, caring and "nice" in that horrid treacly kind of way, and occasionally morose in a fashion that I suppose was supposed to look poetic or something. Not to mention he convinced Alice to take off her top because it would work better for the "energy massage" he was giving her - which sounds suspiciously like a SNAG trick to me rather than a dyke one. Really, he was pretty creepy.

Maybe if they’d had an actual lesbian-identified man playing the character, it coulda worked? I mean, the LIMs I know aren’t much like Lisa, who looked kind of like an overly earnest, pasty, unshaven, half-asleep momma’s-boy fag. My LIMs are more like mildly geeky long-haired fey boys with strong queer political analyses and a penchant for wearing skirts, and carrying them off without looking the least bit like they’re in drag, and they tend to be talented at non-cock-focused sex (at least the show got that part right). As for Alice, all the interaction did for her own character development was show that she may be bisexual but she’s not the least bit queer: "You do lesbian better than any lesbian I know! But all I want is a guy who’s a guy, or a lesbian who’s a girl!" Blecch. So much for that.

Nobody mentioned that there was a very sexy character named Ivan who comes in to confuse the straight girl, Kit, in one of the later episodes. Well, Ivan was sexy when she wasn’t walking around with absurd waist-length blonde hair. Honest, I really don’t have a strong anti-long-hair sentiment - it just really doesn’t suit some people, and in my humble opinion, a cheerleader-style blonde-streaked mane does not belong on an old-school butch drag king with super-masculine body language. (I wasn’t down with her Elvis wig either, if that helps.) In fact, y’know, I’m not even so much into drag kings; the costume-y aspect of the thing kinda ruins the fun. But this felt pretty real to me. Anyway, the little seduction number in the parking garage done to Leonard Cohen’s I’m Your Man? Hot. Though I’m sure that I was being charmed all over again by Leonard’s sublime lyrics and impossibly rich voice as much as by Ivan’s smooth moves.

What else. I thoroughly enjoyed the little two-minute "historical" clips before the opening credits - very interesting idea, to show some seemingly random scene from the 70s or whatever that later ties in with some small piece of the show. Neat.

One thing’s for sure… I’m kind of wistful for my kind of eye candy. The girly girls are nice to look at and all, but when the butchest of the bunch wears more makeup than I’ve ever owned, I start to hanker for a little bit of the "other side" to be shown. If you look on the show’s website, they’ve got a line of character photos at the top, and when I clicked on the one I found the hottest - "gee, I don’t remember seeing her on the show!" - it turned out to be the show’s creator/writer/executive producer, Ilene Chaiken, who of course is a 48-year-old bona fide dyke herself (unlike the bulk of the actresses, though check FAQ question #3 if you want to know the dirt on that) sans makeup, avec pleasantly attractive wrinkles. God, I’m predictable sometimes.

I’ve nicknamed my favourite characters the Background Butches - the girls I find hot all seem to appear onscreen for a split second in a crowd shot here and there, or with half their face blocked by Bette’s elbow or something. Apparently they use real dykes from the Vancouver area to play these Background Butches. I believe it. They certainly are unmistakeably the real thing, unless the producers just occasionally hire an entire women’s hockey tournament to act as extras (and even then the Real Dyke ratio would be pretty high). I just wish I’d get more than just a glimpse once in a while. And while I don’t resent that straight girls are playing the main-character lesbians on the show, it would be nice if at least a couple of them looked more like actual dykes and less like the way a straight guy would like a dyke to look. Ah well, can’t have it all.

Well, I guess that’s about it. That was my dose of lesbian pop culture. I’m no more addicted to The L Word than I ever have been to any other television show, which is to say, I’m not.

I think. Then again, I’ve called Substitute Date up three times now to see when she can bring over Season 2. Ahem. And I’ve started to read some of the many articles on the show on afterellen.com. And Season 3 starts on Thursday, September 28 at 10 p.m. Perhaps this time I’ll find it in my heart to make a weekly commitment to my TV after all.

Just a little anecdote about some total weirdness last week. Remember I posted just after hosting a play party, and mentioned that during the festivities I’d created a pretty pattern of needles on someone’s back? Well, the next day, as I also mentioned, I woke up and headed off to Ottawa to do some consulting work for a chain of sex shops that’s looking to ever-so-gently start incorporating BDSM equipment on their sales floor. The owner wanted to have me come and give the staff a bit of a crash course in BDSM - what customers might look for, what the basic ideas behind BDSM are, and so forth.

So here I was, heading into a world I don’t spend much time in: the land of heterosexual vanilla sex-toy shops. And god, it was a weird trip.

For starters, about five minutes after I got into the car with my client (who picked me up at the bus station), she started reiterating the idea of what she was hoping to get out of the afternoon’s training. It was nothing we hadn’t talked about before - y’know, just get the staff comfortable with the idea of SM and so forth. But she then said, "You know, our clients are mainly just straight couples who want to spice up their sex lives a little bit. We’re not catering to a market full of people who do things like, you know, put needles in each others’ backs and stuff."

Wow. What an uncomfortable moment. I chose to keep my mouth shut for the sake of good business relations. But I had a hard time not… laughing? Frowning? I dunno. Of all the things she could have picked to say, it was so bizarrely specific! And the subtext was so clearly "We’re catering to normal people, not freaks." Did she realize she’d just hired one of the people she seemed to find so freakish? That the hand she’d just shaken had plunged a dozen needles into someone’s skin not 18 hours before? I felt like when a straight person assumes I’m straight and makes a homophobic joke - except in this case it was my employer-du-jour.

That was the first in a series of strange incidents that showed me how far outside my comfy little alterna-happy bubble I actually was.

A few moments later she was chatting on about how she had had a "wild youth" and had now settled down into monogamy. "You know, sometimes you just gotta make choices. It’s like all those polyamorous people out there - it’s just so messy. Eventually you just have to realize you can’t have everything you want." Oy. Strike two. Needless to say I didn’t engage her in a long talk about polyamory, either.

Then we arrived at the actual store. I was… well, let’s just say that my experience of browsing through the products they were selling really served to show me how incredibly spoiled I’ve been as a queer woman raised on queer- and women-friendly sex toy stores like Venus Envy (Ottawa and Halifax), Come As You Are (Toronto), Good For Her (Toronto), Good Vibrations (San Francisco) and Toys in Babeland (Seattle, New York and L.A.), just to name a few.

It’s a bit of a mystery to me, really. I don’t understand how it is that a market that’s traditionally understood to be one of the least affluent (queer women) takes it for granted that our toys will be handmade of high-grade silicone and displayed on Scandinavian-style wood shelves in airy, sunny shops with open-minded and knowledgeable sales staff… whereas the market that’s traditionally understood to be pretty well-off (married suburban heteros) has dark, crowded little carpeted shops stocked with cheap jelly toys made of toxic oil by-products and packaged in plastic bubble packs featuring lascivious photos of women with breast implants so big they look painful. Sure, the staff might be nice, but they’re peddling cheesy sub-grade products, so no matter how open-minded they are, they’ve only got so much leeway to work with.

Not to mention that I take it for granted that if I’m going to one of "my" sex shops, I’ll find the latest issues of a few hip feminist mags, a range of competently produced SM toys, some dyke porn (the kind with actual dykes in it, I mean), some unbleached cotton tampons, latex gloves, the latest Patrick Califia books and erotica anthologies, and maybe a cute pierced and tattooed staff member to flirt with - none of which I’ve ever seen in a "traditional" sex shop.

On the other hand, if I have a pressing need for penis-shaped pasta or glycerin-laced lube (yay for yeast infections!) or Cum-Sucking Fuck Sluts Volume 73 or an inflatable date or scratchy ill-fitting lace lingerie, I know exactly where to go. Sigh.

It’s kinda strange, the idea of walking into a sex shop where I wouldn’t pay money for anything on their shelves, and where the idea of a lesbian couple entering the store would be the day’s gossip among the staff.

Anyway, the staff I taught were perfectly nice and open-minded (even if one of them did shudder at the idea of a butt-plug - !), and none of them let out any anti-SM or otherwise foot-in-mouth comments. And, earlier disparaging comments notwithstanding, the owner was more than kind, and treated me very well - she certainly wasn’t the least bit malicious, just kinda… ignorant, I guess. But nonetheless I walked out of the experience feeling as though I needed to take a shower. I like getting down and dirty as much as anyone else - and teaching about it, natch - but my kind of "dirty" makes me glow afterwards, whereas this kind somehow just made me feel soiled.

I seem to have a big thing lately for watching guys make out with each other on stage. Seriously, I think I’ve seen more boy/boy action in the past month in theatres than on the street - and that’s saying something. Which leads me to wonder if I’m not overdue to pay a visit to Adonis or another one of the men’s strip clubs. I don’t go to strip clubs often, but they’d be a damn sight cheaper than paying for theatre tickets so frequently.

Anyway, I offer you a brief review of my recent escapades in gay theatre. Some of them you may be able to have for yourself in the near future!

First, during the Outgames, I took in the play William & James, directed by Davyn Ryall - a former colleague of mine from Gay Line and the mastermind behind the Harvest International GLBT Theatre Festival that takes place in September. (Please ignore the terrible web design - the festival itself does offer some interesting fare, and it’s been getting noticeably better as the years go by.) Happily, the play is apparently coming back from September 19-27 and October 4-8, so you can check it out for yourselves!

The synopsis: "In mid-19th century Victorian England, a social encounter between two aristocrats leads them to a bizarre living arrangement. Trading financial and domestic security, the agreement locks the men in a battle for dependence, power, and control. This intriguing and provocative tale examines the complexities of relationships and the definitions of love. Heightened language, a playful repartee, and a considered delivery give this play its edgy appeal." (Okay, okay, so I edited this to get rid of a few spelling mistakes and the dreaded misuse of "it’s.")

I personally found it quite delightful - clearly I disagree with the gentleman who rudely started snoring in the front row while it went on. It’s beautifully written and it’s an unusual tale; I appreciate the lack of a cliché ending. It was also pretty interesting to listen to a francophone actor work through a heavily dialogue-focused play written in Victorian-style English - perhaps not for everyone, but lordy he was cute, and the Québécois accent made for an intriguing addition to the experience. And the play does include full-frontal nudity, in case you were curious. Highlights: the argument about who gets to fuck whom up the butt (no, they don’t phrase it quite that way); the subtlety of the emotional undercurrents in otherwise superficial discussions. Really worth attending.

Second, on Tuesday, I hopped on a bus to visit my friend M in Plattsburgh and take in a performance of Tony Kushner’s Perestroika by the Pendragon Theater group. It was held in a community theatre hall in a teensy little New York State town called Saranac Lake. The audience looked exactly like you’d expect an audience to look at 8:00 on a Tuesday night in small-town USA - lots of old-timers in sweatshirts. Not that there’s anything wrong with that - but let’s just say that M and I stood out. Two dykes in leather jackets holding hands amid the beige masses.

Perestroika, for those who aren’t familiar with it, is the second part of Kushner’s masterpiece Angels In America. The first part is widely known under that title alone, but its distinctive subtitle is in fact Millennium Approaches.

(Just to go off on a tangent, in a brilliant stroke of incestuousness, Angels In America is repeatedly referenced in another very well-known gay play, Moises Kaufman’s The Laramie Project, which I reviewed for the Mirror last year. This little factoid does become at least mildly relevant a bit later in this post.)

It’s hard to summarize either part of AIA; the work is a completely bizarre mix of serious and hilarious, realistic and completely surreal, heavily political and whimsically silly. The main focus is on a loosely connected handful of gay men who are each, in their own widely differing ways, dealing with the early part of the AIDS epidemic. It’s a complicated set of interlocking stories that play off each other in most unusual ways. I was very glad indeed that I’d previously read the first part of the play (thank you, book club!) and that I’d had the presence of mind to bring the book along and re-read it in the bus on the way down - otherwise I might have had a very hard time following the plot in the second half. They really do go together. Anyway, it was an absolute joy to see it on the actual stage instead of just in my head. I know that Saranac Lake is a bit of a trek for the average recreational queer theatre-goer, but Pendragon seems to have a history of doing lots of queer-themed work - particularly cool since they’re not a queer troupe and Saranac Lake is not a queer town.

Oh, and yes - I was getting to it! - there is some seriously hot boy-on-boy making out in this play. At least the Pendragon version of it. I think I might have actually seen some tongue. No full frontals, but very believable passion - I thought I might see some audience-member dentures popping out in shock, but nobody seemed the least bit perturbed by the sight of two half-naked men necking for an extended period of time under the spotlight. Right on!

Last but not least, it was M’s turn to accompany me to a play in my hometown tonight. (The leather jacket/hand-holding thing didn’t seem to stand out quite as much here. Funny, that.) This one is far more accessible than Saranac Lake, although be warned that the venue (Mainline Theatre, 3997 St-Laurent) is a bit hard to reach thanks to the entire fucking street being shut down for the annual end-of-summer sidewalk sale, which seems to last three weeks. The play was Gross Indecency: the Three Trials of Oscar Wilde, showing as part of the New Classical Theatre Festival.

Get your ass to the theatre and see this play. It’s amazing. It runs until September 2. Go! Go!

And here’s where Moises Kaufman becomes (directly) relevant to mention. When he wrote The Laramie Project with the help of the Tectonic Theatre Project folks, his technique was highly unusual: he built the entire script using excerpts from interviews the TTP people conducted with Matthew Shephard’s friends and family after his death, along with radio and television coverage and other such documents. He didn’t actually write a single word of it, in truth; it was more like a masterful work of highly artistic editing.

Well, somehow he’s managed to pull it off again. The entire script for Gross Indecency is built using excerpts from actual court documents pertaining to Oscar Wilde’s sodomy trials in the 1890s in England, as well as various biographies, newspaper articles and writings of the time. Lordy, but Kaufman must have done a lot of research work to make this play happen!

And the Gravy Bath Productions people have done a stellar job of bringing it to life. The lead actor, Don Anderson, incarnates Oscar Wilde so brilliantly that I started to forget he wasn’t the man himself right there in front of me. Quite the coup, considering the way the play is staged - extremely fast-paced, with lots of dashing about, each actor switching roles at least two dozen times. Hardly a "realistic" piece of theatre. I’d almost like to go see it a second time, now that I know what to expect. I’d already seen an engaging documentary about Wilde’s life, in addition to attending a couple of lectures and reading at least one book on the topic. So the story itself was no surprise; but despite my familiarity with it, and despite a set that’s both static and spare (a wall-length stack of books and a couple of book-shaped platforms), and a script that’s made up mainly of quotes from 19th-century court documents (many of them actually referenced out loud, in case you were, I dunno, taking notes)… I still found it almost dizzying to follow the action.

And yes, there’s a bit of making out. But only a very little bit. Three boy-on-boy kisses, if I remember correctly. Tender and sincere-seeming, but not passionate and most definitely not naked (though the costumes are exquisitely flattering to the male ass). Ah, well. The story still makes up for it, and it’s still nice to see dudes kiss on stage.

Now, I wonder if I can convince M to come with me to see strippers. As far as entertainment goes, comparatively, it’s a little downmarket, but maybe we can talk about literature and theatre while the boys do their grinding.

I think Oscar Wilde would approve.

I saw a girl today in the metro. She was kind of unremarkable, except for the fact that she had a carefully folded lavender bandanna protruding from the right back pocket of her jeans. I couldn’t help but be curious, so I went to the hanky code site I referenced the other day and looked it up.

Apparently, flagging bottom with lavender means… you’re a drag queen. (Flagging top means you want to do one.)

Umm… maybe it’s just me, but don’t most drag queens kinda look the part? I mean, can you really picture going into a gay men’s cruising bar, looking around, and seeing a lavender hanky in someone’s back pocket… checking your handy-dandy hanky code decoder card (they do actually have these, and no fucking wonder! who can remember all that shit?)… and then going "Oh my! Billy Bob, that’s a drag queen!" Y’know, because the glitter lipstick and wig and seventeen-inch platforms and tiara and shriekingly loud flowered dress and birdseed-bag double-D honkers didn’t give it away beforehand?! Not to mention that most drag queens don’t even have back pockets to flag in. Yeesh!

Oh, and the girl in the metro was too short to be a drag queen. I imagine she just wanted to match with the stripe on her shoes. I bet she’d be appalled if she knew what flights of fancy her little accessory inspired. Sigh.

(Oh, how apropos - Cindy Lauper’s She-Bop is playing on the radio. Ahhh.)

Well, if I didn’t have enough reason to want to bed Carol Queen before, I certainly do now. And it’s for purely academic reasons. Well, sex-geeky ones, at least.

Don’t believe me? Get this. Here I am today, lounging on the grass between appointments and reading a book - Best Sex Writing 2005. This is the first of Violet Blue’s brilliant new annual anthology series which features a fine selection of non-fiction sex writing. In it, Carol Queen has an essay entitled "Visiting Kinsey," in which she describes her experiences of learning about Alfred C. Kinsey, 1940s pioneering sexologist extraordinaire, and of reading his works and eventually visiting his extensive collection at the Kinsey Institute in Bloomington, Indiana.

Seriously folks, if you haven’t heard of this guy yet, go rent a copy of the film Kinsey. It absolutely rocks. Or, if you’re in the mood to dive into a honking enormous biography, read the one by Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy entitled simply Kinsey: A Biography, which was first published in 1998, and revised and republished in 2005 after the film attracted much attention to Kinsey’s story. It too kicks ass, in a very dry and British way, and Gathorne-Hardy has spared no attention to detail. Pick this one in particular because others have been published that are pretty noticeably homophobic - Gathorne-Hardy picks those apart in his book to show the differences between the data about Kinsey’s life and the strange interpretations some biographers have made of it.

Anyway, I’m a massive fan of Kinsey and his work. Carol summarizes it thusly in her essay: "If there wasn’t good, scientific information to be had [about sex], he’d just go collect it. And for the next few decades that’s what he did. He took sex histories and ran the stats. [...] He collected, he counted, and then he published. [...] By the time he was done he had changed the world[.]"

Needless to say, I very much understand, and very much share, her hero worship of Kinsey and his team. He, and they, really did change the face of sex research and the world’s understanding of sexuality.

Now we get to the really good bits. To divulge a bit of the biography and film, one of the things that got people really upset about Kinsey was his unusually, ahem, close relationships with the members of his research team. It seems pretty clear that he had sexual encounters with pretty much all of them - both as part of his research and outside of it. One of those team members was a man named Wardell Pomeroy.

In her essay, Carol writes that she had the honour of studying under Pomeroy while she was at the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality and he was its dean of students. She explains that one day, Pomeroy took her sexual history, Kinsey-style. And then - get this! - she goes on to write the following:

"After we were done, Wardell and I retired to the hot tub. One thing led to another, and soon I could have answered a question that wasn’t on the sex history (but probably should have been): How old were you when you had sexual contact with a member of Kinsey’s research team?"

Oh my gawd. Carol Queen fucked Wardell Pomeroy! Okay, I know, to the average person out there this sounds like no better than high school-caliber gossip, but to a sex geek like myself, that’s like… oh, I can’t possibly come up with an appropriate comparison. I just can’t. Two incredibly, massively important figures in sexology, getting it on across a generation gap. Kinsey cracked open the North American sexual mind in 1948, and Carol Queen became one of the first people to start filling it with queer/kink/sex work/trans-positive sexology and cultural criticism in the 1980s. Both became legends in their own time. I mean, these are seriously big-name shapers of the current sexual climate - the happy half of it, at least. These are the people I idolize. These are rock stars for the sex geek.

These are some of the only people in the world I would ever, in a million years, be interested in starfucking.

So if Alfred Kinsey fucked Wardell Pomeroy… and Wardell Pomeroy fucked Carol Queen… then if I fucked Carol Queen (or vice versa, I’m really not too picky about the details), I’d be three degrees of separation from fucking Kinsey himself.

The very prospect is enough to boggle the mind. I feel like some sort of holy essence might pass down the line of these towering figures in forward-thinking sexology, and infuse itself into my bloodstream, if I could just convince Carol she really wants to get naked with me. Sort of a sexological blessing ritual, an anointing of the next generation (if I may be so bold as to think I could follow in their illustrious footsteps one of these days). I think my temperature just shot up into fever zone. And I’m taking a trip to San Francisco this fall, where Carol lives… and we’ve met a couple of times, and I have her e-mail address… oh goodness! I can’t handle the excitement.

Of course there’s really no guarantee she’d be interested. In fact I imagine that realistically, the chances are pretty small. But… what a thought. Three degrees of separation from the man himself. Wow.

Then again, maybe she would say yes. She did, after all, write the following of her Pomeroy tryst: "It was as close as I could ever get to fucking Alfred C. Kinsey. I appreciate history and lineage, you know, and as an IASHS grad from the Pomeroy years I know I am in a direct line of descent from the sexual revolution that erupted at Indiana University and from which the United States has clearly not yet recovered."

So I guess you never know. Carol’s not really my type, but some things can be overlooked in the quest for, um, history and lineage.

Oh, boy. Okay, so please pardon my moment of complete starstruck insanity. Rather than actually pursue this particular starfuck, I think I’ll just replay She-Bop and lie in bed with numerous copies of Carol Queen’s work, drop my delicious-smelling copy of Kinsey’s Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female onto my face, and she-bop my way to some solo sex geeky bliss.

But I can’t make any promises for what I might try next time I see the Queen.

I got an e-mail today from a friend of mine who’s setting up a queer buddhist group. I just had to share part of the note:

"Hey Andrea,

So, I set up the queer buddhist group and will be sending out an invite tonight for the first informal gathering to take place this Sunday evening. The ’subscribe’ details are below. Please pass along, maybe in your hot Blog?? hehe plug me, plug me, please! lol hmmm that may have a different significance …oh whatever lol"

How delicious is that? Well, I’m a helpful gal… and how on earth could anyone turn down such a lovely offer? So, in case you’re interested, you can subscribe by sending a note to queermtlbuddhist-subscribe@yahoogroups.ca.

I figure said buddhist won’t mind me mentioning this in my blog, because after all, aren’t buddhists all zen and shit? ‘Sides, you’d have to actually join if you wanted to know who the person was, and if you did that, then you’d be zen too, so you wouldn’t care about whatever innuendo-filled requests my friend might aim in my direction.

Now, all I have to do is pack a selection of my favourite butt-plugs and wait for Sunday night. Heh heh. I like buddhists.

Yeah, I thought there might be something funny going on.

The Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival has issued its own press release to clarify what’s going on: specifically, they in fact have not changed their trans attendance policy at all. I’ve posted the whole press release below, since it doesn’t seem to be available on the festival website. Interestingly, it’s also not available on the Camp Trans website.

Y’know, I’m not there; I don’t know any of these people. So any comment I make should be taken with the caveat that I may be off-base due to lack of information.

That said… what a stupid, ridiculous, messy situation. I’m pretty unimpressed with everyone involved.

I’m unimpressed with Michfest, for starters, but then I always was. Looks like I’ll have to cancel the trip I had (in all seriousness) already started planning for next summer, due to the reinscription of anti-trans sentiment on the festival agenda. Definitely not my thing.

Okay, so let me begin with a rundown of my own politics on the topic of gender inclusiveness.

I totally understand the need for women to gather in women-only spaces; such spaces have been an amazing source of strength for me for many years now. In much the same way, I support the need for other groups to rally around a particular feature of their identity and experience - people of colour, say, or people with disabilities, or people from a given profession (to make the question less specifically political). The idea being to build community, share resources, and so forth.

I just really don’t get the idea of setting those boundaries based on biology, especially when it comes to the experience of being a woman. There are so many other factors that separate us and make our experiences non-universal - skin colour, geography, culture, language, age, ability, education, class, economics. Why would a woman who had become woman (perhaps in the truest interpretation of Beauvoir) count any less than a woman who was born one? Sure, if a group or event was built around issues pertaining to biologically female bodies - I dunno, menstruation, pregnancy, menopause - then maybe it’d make sense. But in the case of Michfest, it’s a music festival, for cryin’ out loud. What’s the issue? How would the presence of trans women make this any less women’s space? Not to mention, what would the festival do with intersex folks? I mean… gender can’t just be boiled down to biology. It’s just not that simple and clear-cut.

Now, a further explanation that doesn’t seem to enter the discussion very often for Michfest. In my mind, "women" includes anyone who identifies in everyday life as a woman, plus those genderqueer folks who feel comfortable being understood as and taken for women at the time they are in that space. Women-only space does not, in my opinion, have room for trans guys. Why? Out of deep and genuine respect for their desire to move through the world as men. Not as half-men, as sort-of men, as maybe-men. As real, valid men. Who are not women. Who therefore do not belong in women-only space. Believe me, my personal and political history (and present!) attests to the fact that I’m a strong supporter of tranny boys - and for me, that means not pretending they’re still girls when it happens to be convenient for me because I like them/want to date them/appreciate their contributions/whatever. I came to this take on things through extensive reading, discussion and consideration, and I credit a few of the FTM activists I most respect for helping me to see this clearly - starting with the pair of Montreal locals (an FTM and his female now-ex-partner) with whom I first got to dissect this stuff years ago, and continuing through the years to Patrick Califia, whose pointed take on the matter, when I interviewed him in November 2005, was as follows: "There are lots of people in academia who are referring to themselves as trans who would be more properly described as lesbians. I think you really have to respect women-only space!"

So. My politics now explained, let’s get back to Michfest in particular.

I don’t argue people’s right to make distinctions in their groups, even when I don’t always understand those distinctions. Particularly when it’s a privately run group or event, which Michfest is, I do believe people should have the right to make the management decisions they please. In my opinion at least, the issue at hand is more the basis for the distinction being drawn here than necessarily the distinction itself or the right to make it. If no other factors that play into the incredible diversity of women’s experiences are being considered in the admission policy, why the biological one? I have yet to see a satisfactory explanation for it, which leads me to draw potentially unflattering conclusions.

It’s pretty rare that I’ve ever heard someone argue the "womyn-born-womyn" side of things without hearing an undercurrent of transphobia in there somewhere, or at least deep misunderstanding. I do understand that, as the press release states, the simple fact of excluding trans women doesn’t necessarily equate to transphobia. Certainly, excluding men from women’s groups doesn’t necessarily equate to man-hating, nor does excluding whites from groups for people of colour equate to racism. But I’ve yet to encounter a group that practices trans exclusion that wasn’t also transphobic to at least some degree. So of course I’m suspicious of the Michfest organizers on that count. I don’t pretend to know for sure; I don’t like making blunt accusations when I haven’t spoken to the person in question. But I have a hunch.

The press release below, for example, contains the following sentence: "In 1999, Camp Trans protesters caused extensive disruption of the Festival, in which a male from Camp Trans publicly displayed male genitals in a common shower area and widespread disrespect of women’s space was voiced."

Now, I could be way wrong on this. But I have the strong feeling that a person with male genitals who would enter Michfest as a member of Camp Trans probably doesn’t consider themselves to be male. My guess, to go out on a limb, is that there are relatively few biological males out there who would meet all of the following criteria: a) identify as male b) care about the Michfest situation in the first place c) care enough about it and have strong enough pro-trans opinions to join Camp Trans and d) get that far and then remain stupid enough to opt for the strategy of running into a women-only festival to flash the girls in the shower.

In other words, the press release is likely talking about a transwoman and deliberately misinterpreting her gender by calling her "a male." This does not do much to convince me that the Michfest folks aren’t transphobic.

Of course, we can certainly argue about the appropriateness of displaying male genitals in a women-only space. I dunno - it probably wouldn’t have bothered me to see them, personally. The surprise might have registered, but the next thing that would have popped into my head would have been "Oh. Transwoman." (The slightly longer version being, "This is a women’s space, therefore that person is a woman, not a slobbering voyeuristic man who somehow made it past the gates and into the showers to potentially assault me and my sisters. And she’s probably feeling pretty scared right now and being naked in this space is an act of courage. You go, girl.") And I would have gone about my business.

But I can see why it might upset some who haven’t got my politics or who really can’t stomach the sight of a penis and deliberately choose women’s spaces to avoid ever having to deal with that possibility. I don’t think that justifies hatred and violence, but discomfort and misunderstanding I can understand. Not everyone has access to trans-related education, for starters, even if they have the best of intentions and the most open of minds. So, to put myself in the shoes of the presumed transwoman in question, I can see why it would suck to feel like you had to cover up your non-conforming genitals when everyone else gets to be happily naked. There are all kinds of reasons why a transwoman might not have surgery, and the vast majority of those reasons have nothing to do with a desire to shock or upset Michfest attendees. And everyone has a right to shower, no? But at the same time, I think I’d have chosen to be more discreet and aware of people’s boundaries - which, in my opinion, might be better challenged through education than through exposing a controversial appendage in public space. Taking action that runs a fairly high risk of shocking and upsetting people rarely does much good for the purpose of gaining acceptance when tensions are high to begin with. But hey, that’s my own activist tactics talking - many others surely disagree.

Now, for the second half of tonight’s lambasting… I’ve also got at least one big reason why I’m unimpressed with Camp Trans.

As I mentioned in my last post, it really bothered me to see that the Michfest folks didn’t have a press release or amended policy statement on their site, and it bothered me that they hadn’t contacted Camp Trans to inform them of the change. Well, gee, maybe that’s because there was no change.

Seems to me that before you issue a press release about someone else’s policies, you might do well to check in with the people in charge - fact-checking being a pretty basic PR/journalism/common-sense item to check off before you inform the world at large of a pretty monumental piece of news. Clearly, the Camp Trans folks did no such thing.

At best, that’s simply shoddy activism or bad PR work; at worst, it makes me wonder about whether or not they spread misinformation on purpose. Neither option is very appealing. Either the pro-trans-inclusion side of the debate is being spearheaded by irresponsible activists, or it’s being spearheaded by shit-disturbing drama queens who are trying to piss everyone off by using underhanded means to try and get their way. I would really have liked to see better. Really, when you’re a small band of activists aiming to change the world, you can’t afford that kind of fuck-up. From this point forth, regardless of my own politics (which are much more inclined towards the Camp Trans point of view than the Michfest one) I’m going to have a hard time taking the work of Camp Trans seriously or seeing them as credible sources of information. Dudes, no matter how you slice it, that was a stupid, stupid move.

Y’know, maybe this is my idealist activist self speaking, but it seems to me that if someone wanted to really change the way Michfest works, they’d start their own. Not a camp for trans people protesting Michfest’s policy - I mean another Michfest entirely. Title it something different, of course; make it on land that’s comparable in terms of size, space, accessibility, and so forth. Take a major page from the Michfest book. Hold it a week or two before or after Michfest takes place. Make it affordable. Make it women-only. And make it inclusive of trans women. Then see what happens.

My guess is, were all these factors to actually be fulfilled, that many people from younger generations, along with open-minded members of the older ones, would gravitate towards the new place. The original Michfest could keep operating undisturbed, but eventually, as so many things do, it would simply shrink to something that’s representative of the number of people who agree with its policy. (Y’know, much like attendance at Christian churches has been steadily dwindling for three generations, in Canada at least - with no need for help from Pagan protest camps across the street.) And the new festival could grow. Years might go by, and the two festivals might coexist, or attendance at each might each ebb or flow depending on all kinds of factors. But all other things being equal, people would simply have the choice. And isn’t choice kinda the whole point here?

***

MICHIGAN WOMYN’S MUSIC FESTIVAL SETS THE RECORD “STRAIGHT”
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE CONTACT: Lisa Vogel
August 22, 2006 231-757-4766

Hart, Michigan  Seeking to correct misinformation widely distributed by “Camp Trans” organizers, Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival founder and producer Lisa Vogel released the following clarification:

“Since 1976, the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival has been created by and for womyn-born womyn, that is, womyn who were born as and have lived their entire life experience as womyn. Despite claims to the contrary by Camp Trans organizers, the Festival remains a rare and precious space intended for womyn-born womyn.”

The facts surrounding the interactions between WWTMC and Camp Trans organizers are as follows:

In the months preceding this year’s Festival, held August 8  13, there was communication between a Camp Trans organizer named Lorraine and Lisa Vogel. Letters from Lorraine continued during the Festival, when they were hand-delivered to the Festival’s front gate from Camp Trans, which takes place on Forest Service Land across from Festival property. On
Tuesday, August 8th, Camp Trans organizers inquired at the Box Office about Festival admission. They were told that the Festival is intended for womyn-born womyn, and that those who seek to purchase tickets are asked to respect that intention. Camp Trans organizers left without purchasing tickets. They returned the next day and were given the same information. Lorraine at that point chose to purchase a ticket.

On Wednesday, August 9th, Vogel sent a reply letter to Lorraine which stated in part:

“I deeply desire healing in our communities, and I can see and feel that you want that too. I would love for you and the other organizers of Camp Trans to find the place in your hearts and politics to support and honor space for womyn who have had the experience of being born and living their life as womyn. I ask that you respect that womon born womon is a valid and honorable gender identity. I also ask that you respect that womyn born womyn deeply need our space — as do all communities who create space to gather, whether that be womyn of color, trans womyn or trans men . . . I wish you well, I want healing, and I believe this is possible between our communities, but not at the expense of deeply needed space for womyn born womyn.”

Vogel’s written request that Camp Trans organizers respect the Festival as womyn-born-womyn space was consistent with information provided to Camp Trans organizers who approached the Festival Box Office. “Does this represent a change in the Festival’s commitment to womyn-born womyn space? No.” says Vogel. “If a transwoman purchased a ticket, it represents nothing more than that womon choosing to disrespect the stated intention of this Festival.”

“As feminists, we call upon the transwomen’s community to help us maintain womyn only space, including spaces created by and for womyn-born womyn. As sisters in struggle, we call upon the transwomen’s community to meditate upon, recognize and respect the differences in our shared experiences and our group identities even as we stand shoulder to shoulder as women, and as members of the greater queer community. We once again ask the transwomen’s community to recognize that the need for a separate womyn-born womyn space does not stand at odds with recognizing the larger and beautiful diversity of our shared community.”

In an effort to build further understanding of the Festival’s perspective, answers are provided to questions raised by the recent Camp Trans press release (which contains misinformation):

Why would the Festival sell a ticket to an individual who is not a womon-born womon if the Festival is intended as a space created by and for womyn-born womyn? From its inception the Festival has been home to womyn who could be considered gender outlaws, either because of their sexual orientation (lesbian, bisexual, polyamorous, etc.) or their gender presentation (butch, bearded, androgynous, femme  and everything in between). Many womyn producing and attending the Michigan Festival are gender variant womyn. Many of the younger womyn consider themselves differently gendered, many of the older womyn consider themselves butch womyn, and the dialogue is alive and well on the Land as our generational mix continues to inform our ongoing understanding about gender identity and the range of what it means to be female. Michigan provides one of the safest places on the planet for womyn who live and present themselves to the world in the broadest range of gender _expression. As Festival organizers, we refuse to question anyone’s gender. We instead ask that womon-born womon be respected as a valid gender identity, and that the broad queer and gender-diverse communities respect our commitment to one week each year for womyn-born womyn to gather.

Did the Festival previously refuse to sell tickets to transwomen? The Festival has consistently communicated our intention about who the Festival is created by and for. In 1999, Camp Trans protesters caused extensive disruption of the Festival, in which a male from Camp Trans publicly displayed male genitals in a common shower area and widespread disrespect of women’s space was voiced. The following year, our 25th anniversary, we issued a statement that we would not sell tickets to those entering for the purpose of disrupting the Festival. While this is widely pointed to by Camp Trans supporters as a "policy," it was a situational response to the heated circumstances of 1999, intended to reassure the womyn who have attended for years that the Festival remained  as it does today  intended for womyn who were born as and have lived their entire life experience as womyn, despite the disrespect and intentional disruption Camp Trans initiated.

Is the Festival transphobic? We strongly assert there is nothing transphobic with choosing to spend one week with womyn who were born as, and have lived their lives as, womyn. It is a powerful, uncommon experience that womyn enjoy during this one week of living in the company of other womyn-born womyn. There are many opportunities in the world to share space with the entire queer community, and other spaces that welcome all who define themselves as female. Within the rich diversity now represented by the broader queer community, we believe there is room for all affinity groups to enjoy separate, self-determined, supportive space if they choose. Supporting womyn-born womyn space is no more inherently transphobic than supporting womyn of color space is racist. We believe that womyn-born womyn have a right to gather separately from the greater womyn’s community. We refuse to be forced into false dichotomies that equate being pro-womyn-born womyn space with being anti-trans; indeed, many of the womyn essential to the Michigan Festival are leaders and supporters of trans-solidarity work. The Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival respects the transsexual community as integral members of the greater queer community. We call upon the transsexual community in turn to respect and support womyn-born womyn space and to recognize that a need for a separate womyn-born womyn space does not stand at odds with recognizing transwomen as part of the larger diversity of the womyn’s community.

What is Camp Trans? Camp Trans was first created in 1994 as a protest to the Festival as womyn-born womyn space. Camp Trans re-emerged in 1999 and has been held across the road from the Festival every year since. A small gathering of people who camp and hold workshops and a few performances on Forest Service land across the road, Camp Trans attempts to educate womyn who are attending the Festival about their point of view regarding trans inclusion at the Festival. At times they have advocated for the Festival to welcome anyone who, for whatever period of time, defines themselves as female, regardless of the sex they were born into. At other times, Camp Trans activists have advocated opening the Festival to all sexes and genders.

What is the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival? It is the largest and longest running womyn’s festival in the United States. Since the first Festival in 1976, tens of thousands of womyn from all corners of the world have made the pilgrimage to this square mile of land in Northern Michigan. The essence of the Festival is that it is one week a year that is by, for and about the glorious diversity of womyn-born womyn and we continue to stand by our labor of love to create this space. Our focus has not changed in the 31 years of our celebration and it remains fixed on the goal of providing a celebratory space for a shared womyn-born-womyn experience.

Hot off the presses: Michfest has finally let the trannies in. It was about fucking time.

For those who aren’t familiar with the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival and the trans situation, here’s a brief summary: every summer, a week in Michigan, thousands of dykes, lots of music, lots of workshops, women-only space. No trans girls allowed since the first official kicking-out of Nancy Burkholder in 1991. Much political/personal wrangling in various lesbian and women’s magazines, discussion boards, etc. over the past 15 years. Founding of Camp Trans in 2003 across the street from Michfest to protest the anti-trans policy (detailed info on Camp Trans’ history here and purpose here).

This quote from the Camp Trans press release tells the story of the recent change:

"Organizers of Camp Trans, the annual protest across the road from the
festival, say that every year at least one trans woman at Camp Trans walks to the festival gate with a group of supporters, explains that she is trans, and tries to buy a ticket.  In past years, the festival box office has produced a printed copy of the policy and refused. ‘This time, the response was, "cash or credit?"’ said Jessica Snodgrass, a Camp Trans organizer and festival attendee who spent the week reaching out to supporters inside the fest. ‘They said the festival has no policy barring any woman from attending.’"

Apparently there was at least one discussion workshop (run by the chief organizer of Camp Trans) on the new trans-inclusive state of affairs, and supporters near and far voiced their happiness at the turn of events.

All well and good - I certainly wouldn’t want to put a damper on what’s obviously a pretty triumphant time. And needless to say, I fully support trans inclusion in women-only spaces. This has been a long-standing part of the way my colleagues and I have run Tip of the Tongue (the les/bi social group I co-led from 2000 to this summer), and the way La Modératrice runs the Unholy Army with my support.

But there’s a couple of things about the Michfest thing that still make me raise an eyebrow. First of all, clearly the Michfest organizers came to some sort of decision about their policy, and considering the 15 years of controversy, that’s a pretty big move. But just as clearly, they didn’t do any kind of outreach to make that information available to potential attendees, to the general public, or even just to Camp Trans right outside their gates. Instead they waited for the Camp Trans folks to perform their customary "test" (which Michfest consistently failed for a decade and a half) and simply gave a different response to it than usual. That hardly feels like positive change - more like grudging assent. Like, "Maybe if we do this nice and quiet-like, we can avoid having to apologize for, explain, or otherwise deal with our history of discrimination. Maybe if we just let them in now, those bloody persistent trannies will finally shut up and get off our case."

Also, while the Camp Trans website gives a full press release and explains what their future plans are, given that they started as a protest against a policy that now doesn’t exist, the Michfest website contains not a word about the change. No press release. No policy statement. No word of welcome to their trans sisters. No explanation of what went on behind the scenes or of how the festival plans to function in the future.

I dunno, man. This all smacks of weirdness to me. Considering the Festival has been so overtly hostile and discriminatory for so long, this feels more like a grumbling acquiescence than a warm welcome. If Michfest were going to be truly trans-inclusive and welcoming, there are some really easy ways to show that. I mean, how much effort does it really take to write a press release? It would just need to say, "After much deliberation and consideration, Michfest has decided to make a change to its long-standing admission policy. We would like to announce that starting now, trans women are welcome to attend the festival. We would like to thank our colleagues X and Y for their assistance in the process of policy change. If you are interested in learning more about trans issues as they pertain to Michfest, feel free to attend ABC workshop to be held on (date, time), or visit (website). We look forward to many years of collaboration with Camp Trans and to keeping our festival a welcoming and inclusive place for women of all kinds."

I really, really want to believe that the "womyn-with-a-Y" festival organizers have finally come around, politically, to accepting that women who used to be men can still be bona fide, fully qualified, perfectly acceptable women. Better yet if they’ve realized that it should be nobody’s privilege to police the boundaries of who "qualifies" in the first place, and that women’s and feminist groups are really exceptionally well placed to set an example and show the rest of the world how gender inclusiveness should be done, given how much fighting we’ve done on similar grounds ourselves over the past couple of centuries. But stretch though I might, I’m having a hard time seeing this particular state of affairs as a full-on victory. It feels more like a half-hearted nod than a sea change.

I suppose, at the very least, that it’s a starting point. There will doubtless be many more political battles, educational opportunities, discussions, debates, workshops, run-ins and other situations brought about by trans inclusion at Michfest; now, they’ll get to happen inside the gates instead of outside them. Or rather, the ones happening inside the gates will now include actual transwomen, instead of exclusively taking place between non-trans women debating whether or not their sisters outside deserve to enter. This is progress, yes, and it is major and significant progress. I just don’t think I’ll be putting on my party hat quite yet.

On the other hand, I might just buy a ticket for the first time next year, now that I don’t have to worry (technically at least) that the very act of attending is one of discrimination against my trans friends, lovers and colleagues. As a big fan of women-only spaces, I’ve wanted to go for years; I’ve heard tales of how there’s just nothing else like Michfest, and I believe them. Tip of the Tongue times several thousand? Sign me up. So maybe, thanks to this policy change, I’ll finally get to participate in the institution that is the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. I never thought it would happen. Just forgive me if I do so feeling a little cautious instead of completely comfortable. I’m not worried about the possibility of a woman peeing standing up in the port-o-potty next door to me. I am, however, worried about finding myself engaged in sisterly bonding with a bunch of bigots who "tolerate" the presence of transwomen instead of valuing it. I may technically qualify as a womyn (singular womon?), but that kind of atmosphere leaves me out as much as a closed gate ever left out a tranny girl.

You know you’ve had a good night when there’s discarded bondage rope all over the floor, a sharps container full of bloody needles, a chain-and-pipe trapeze bar dangling from an eyebolt in your ceiling, a plate of brownies on the table, and a woman wearing nothing but fancy black lace underwear washing your dishes at 3:30 a.m. It’s even better if you’ve still got lube between your toes.

Good lord, but that was fun. I love hosting play parties. Apparently there was a point tonight at which every single one of the dozen hot girls in my apartment was engaged in some form of sadomasochistic activity. I wouldn’t know; I was too distracted by the three hours I spent using many, many feet of thin cord to weave one of said hotties into a human macramé project. Of course with your average macramé project you don’t finish it off by slipping a dozen needles  through someone’s skin in perfectly symmetrical order, with alternating colours,  angled to best complement your handiwork. Whatevah. To each their own.

Yeah, remember that post about Midori’s bondage class a couple weeks back? And how I thought bondage wasn’t really that sexy, except maybe…? Well, maybe is yes. I think I do have to be in the right mood for it, i.e. patient and artistic and focused and toppish all at once, but hey, when it next strikes I won’t argue.

Speaking of kink and classes, I better get to bed. Tomorrow I’m hopping on a bus to Ottawa, where I’ll be spending a few hours doing some consulting work for a sex toy chain there that’s looking to incorporate BDSM equipment into their range. I get to coach the staff on the basics of BDSM, the psychology of a customer who wants to buy such products, the Ottawa BDSM scene, and a whole lot of other yummy fun stuff.

Every once in a while, when I look at my life, I feel like a very happy cat. All I want to do is sit back and purr.

(Make that snore. Off to bed with me - it is 4 a.m. after all. Good night!)

For those of you who’ve been reading this blog since its very first post, you may remember that the reason I started it was because of a single sentence in the blog of talented BC-based writer Trish Kelly, a sort-of acquaintance of mine. Well, thanks to the network that is Friendster, I was made aware of an article she wrote recently for an online magazine, The Tyee (you may venture a guess as to how this is pronounced - I can’t quite fathom it myself). The article, entitled "Losing My Veginity: Why I’m Putting Out for Local Seafood," is part of a series entitled "The Guilt-Free Hedonist."

The intro page to the series explains: "In this Tyee series, we’re on a quest for ethical indulgences, and are looking for examples of food, shelter, clothing and transportation. Fun is the key to each item’s enjoyment. And for many, ethics enhances this pleasure."

Ummm… how did they manage to leave sex off that list? Doesn’t that count as an indulgence - perhaps a bit more than, say, transportation? For most people, getting to the office isn’t exactly an indulgence. How strange. Given Trish’s article, it would seem they’re not shy to publish a whole lot of innuendo - so why not the real deal?

Of course, this has me thinking about the kind of piece I’d write if I were to write about ethical sex. Now, it would appear they’re talking about consumerist indulgence, rather than the more human variety; in other words, I don’t think that by "ethics" they’d see an article about responsible non-monogamy or consensual pain to be a good fit. If I understand correctly, they’re talking about finding products that one can purchase without worrying that they’ve killed off ten species of frog or been manufactured in a sweatshop where people are docked half a day’s pay for taking a pee break.

So I have a few ideas to suggest. Interestingly, I’ve realized that for the most part, the ethical sex toys are the highest-quality and sexiest, too - how convenient is that?

You can get vegan/organic sex toys, lube and safer sex products at the Veg Sex Shop, or at Vegan Erotica, whose tagline is "passion for the compassionate" (how cute!). I’ve never attempted to use vegan lube, condoms or gloves before, but I’m fascinated to give ‘em a shot - when I get around to it I’ll post a review, for sure. In fact I was interested to learn a bit more about how condoms aren’t vegan in the first place - I mean, how exactly would one test a condom on an animal? And isn’t latex kinda… not an animal product? Hmm. So I poked around a bit and found this article, which explains that for most condoms, the latex is manufactured with a milk protein called casein. Wow. Who knew. The vegan ones use cocoa powder. (Is it organic fair-trade cocoa, though?…)

Apparently the Vegan Erotica folks (check out this cool article about them and BDSM!) have discovered a synthetic equivalent to leather, which they’re billing as "vegan leather." The only problem here is that, while I can’t speak to the situation with vegan leather in particular, a lot of synthetics are actually more damaging to the environment (and as a result, to various sorts of animals) than their leather equivalents. Most BDSM toys are apparently made with regular old cowhide, a type of leather that’s a by-product of the existing meat industry; and replacements like PVC are so toxic to the environment that manufacturing facilities have been banned in several states.

This information I gathered during a lengthy e-mail exchange with Leatherbeaten, a small-town BDSM toy operation in Ontario, a few years back. That discussion helped me figure out I’d rather just go with the leather already - besides, the stuff smells soooo good. I do avoid things like foxtail floggers and items made with kangaroo leather, which I most definitely don’t come with the comforting by-product status, but when the McDonald’s down the block from me is churning out thousands of burgers a week (many of them right into the garbage), I don’t feel bad about purchasing one or two toys a year that use up the leftover skins. Okay, so phrasing it like that sounds pretty gross, but ethically it still works for me.

Of course there are still vegan options for BDSM toys that aren’t made of PVC. For example, Master André makes a vegan line of floggers, cats and single-tails with military-grade parachute cord in, like, seven dozen different colours; he plaits the handles as beautifully with cord as he does with leather, and weights them just right, so they have a pleasant heft and you don’t have to worry that "vegan" means "cheap-looking and badly made." The advantage of these toys is that they retain the thuddy sensation many people like from their floggers, rather than the obligatory sting of rubber and other synthetics. And if sting is your thing, anything made of rubber is probably vegan, though that doesn’t mean it was made in PC work environments (or using fair-trade cocoa powder). You can also check out Australian retailer Getkinky, which uses only vegan materials for everything they sell - do let me know if you try ‘em and like their stuff, I’ve never read a review. Oh, and take a look at this interesting post on veganism and BDSM, and its many responses.

When it comes to insertable sex toys, I’ve always been a firm believer that silicone is the way to go regardless of your ethics - they’re just much higher quality and much safer (thanks to being non-porous) than just about any other material for something you intend put inside an orifice that’s lined with vulnerable mucous membranes. While I don’t know much about the environmental impact of silicone, the stuff is vegan, and for the most part silicone sex toys are made by cottage-industry craftspeople, who are definitely the people I want to be supporting. Vixen’s silicone toys are some of the absolute best. I guess you could always do that traditional thing and use a cucumber or a carrot (organic, I hope), but honestly, the idea has never interested me - fridges make things, well, frigid, and salad fixings have limited sex appeal in the first place.

As for harnesses, I’ve never met anything better than Aslan Leather’s rubber ones. It’s one helluva lot more hygienic to strap it on with rubber than with leather, thanks to all those lovely juices that tend to be present when one is strapping it on in the first place - leather being basically uncleanable, or at least, so porous that I’d never personally feel comfortable using it on more than one person in such intimate ways. (It’s one thing to dress someone up or whack them with something made of leather, quite another to soak the stuff in bodily fluids.) Not to mention that the instant you break a sweat, even just a little one - and trust me, if you’re strapping it on, you aren’t staying dry - the rubber conveniently glues itself to your skin and as a result doesn’t slide around. Because it’s always so embarrassing when your cock swooshes around to protrude from your left hip right in the middle of the act. Or so I hear. Anyway, rubber is vegan, and Carrie Gray runs a small Toronto-based business (with an international reputation) that’s well worth supporting.

If you want to take things really far, you can even ensure that the people populating your porn are indie vegans, at Veg Porn. Neato.

So I guess, with all this in mind, for the most part I must be having pretty darned ethical sex, eh? Plus, I just switched to energy-saver light bulbs and, though I can’t seem to manage the vegan eating thing as a full-time commitment, I’ve been buying organic milk, honey, yogurt, cheese and eggs when I consume those things, which lately has been less frequent than ever. Wow. I just have to work on the vegan lube/glove/condom thing, and I’ll get even more angel points.

Good thing it’s still ethical to torture people and date more than one hottie at once. That’s definitely the kind of hedonism I don’t think I’ll ever want to give up.