Sex Geek

Awww. This is really kinda cute. The hot boys at Club 281 - Montreal’s only men-strip-for-women club - have decided to support the ladies who have supported them over the years. They’re holding a breast cancer fundraising weekend October 5 to 7, pimping themselves out for the pleasure of their audiences and giving the profits to the Quebec Breast Cancer Foundation. I love it! I haven’t been to see boys strip in years, but this might just convince me!

Ahhh. San Francisco. Gawd, that was a nice trip. Let’s see if I can give a quick summary… well, time with P was fabulous, although there wasn’t as much of it as we’d both hoped; we’re planning to do things a bit differently next time so we get to see more of each other. Among other things, sweet California boy has offered to visit Montreal in the winter - brave soul!

I saw Carol Queen on at least three separate occasions, and didn’t come any closer to bedding her, which is… well, just fine, really. I think the idea is more fun in theory than it might be in practice - not that I doubt she’s a stellar lover, but rather because she’s really not my type and that’s never a good place to start. She hugs me when we see each other though - does that count for something?

Midori’s art opening was wonderful. She recruited P as a model for future shoots (hey, he’s hot!) - she wants to slick him up in Vaseline or something. Sounds gross but I can see why the smooth-skinned super-shiny look might work well on camera. Anyway, the opening attracted a rather international crowd - I met a pro-domme from Chicago (who spoke French with me, woo-hoo!), a leatherdyke from Hamburg, a few kinksters from Seattle and of course some hot locals. And the gallery owner was a treat - a sweet redhead who, it turns out, poses naked in bondage for Midori as well. How many gallery owners appear in their artists’ work, let alone the totally kinked-up kind? Neato.

The afterparty was cool - I had an odd experience in the private section of the bar where there was a queer porn screening going on. This cute skinny mohawked dyke in red fishnets checked my name off the list, and another skinny bleached-blonde cutie in rockabilly jeans stamped my hand. I settled on a bench to watch the screening, and after a few minutes I realized that the two girls fucking on the bathroom floor onscreen looked awfully familiar. Hmmm… skinny mohawked femme girl… skinny bleached blonde rockabilly butch… hey, just a minute! It would appear that I’d been checked and stamped by a pair of dyke porn stars. Sweet!

The "Perverts Put Out!" reading on Saturday evening was lots of fun, with stories ranging from a simple schoolgirl spanking scene (very well written!) to an insane satirical tale about a girl’s quest for the ultimate degradation (courtesy Charlie Anders, publisher of Other magazine). We were also treated to a weird gender-bent incest D/s story that someone had recorded on a computer because she couldn’t be there in person to read it - they put a laptop on the lectern and aimed the mike at it, and then Carol Queen stripped off her bra and hung it on the monitor to sex it up a bit. What a hoot. It’s funny - the crowd was good, but it was hardly an auditorium. If you put CQ, Simon Sheppard and Lori Selke up at a mike in, say, Toronto, there would be a crowd of hundreds, but I guess when you live in the same city as literary luminaries, they become a sort of everyday thing and it’s not as much of a big deal when they read. Context is everything, I suppose.

The Citadel play party was pretty good - it would have been better with some queer critical mass, but nonetheless, fun times. It’s awfully hard to complain about such things as atmosphere when you’ve… argh… I am gritting my teeth to stick to my policy of not sharing the details of what I get up to, which should serve as an indication that it was very enjoyable indeed. Mmm. Anyway, the Citadel space itself is huge and really well set up. There are dozens of play stations of many different sorts, including slings and crosses and tables and medical areas and cages. But it doesn’t have that weird gym-like feel I noticed at the TES party in New York; somehow it still feels pretty intimate. Nicely done. The dungeon is laid out on two floors; the basement is all play, and the ground floor has a few play stations but also a full kitchen, a sizeable lounge area, a coat check and bathrooms. Dungeon rules are both much more lax and much more comprehensive than in Montreal - the only kinds of play they ban are breath play, piss and scat. Anything else pretty much goes, including sex. Yes, sex! Crazy shit, isn’t it? I’ve been to private parties where sex was allowed, but I don’t think I’ve ever been to a dungeon where that was permitted. What will those wacky Californians think of next!

And the crowning glory of the trip: Folsom Street Fair itself. It was pretty awesome. And yet, it didn’t feel remarkably different from a lot of other things I’ve seen. Which is not to say it’s a banal experience to see what happens when you pack 400,000 kinksters into a few city blocks with several dozen booths featuring everything from gay porn (one stall had a six-foot poster featuring a rim job in progress) to toys (The Frugal Domme officially kicks ass!) to chiropractor services (I guess for when you throw your back out from excessive flogging?) to rope bondage demonstrations (I saw a hot shaven-headed boi get strung up in a full split - yum!). Simply that it felt like a hybrid leather conference / gay pride weekend, so the overall effect was bizarrely familiar despite being nothing like anything I’ve ever experienced.

Of course at your average gay pride, you don’t see a leatherman kneeling on the street corner while passersby are invited to piss all over him (with many actually doing so), or a guy suspended in bondage head-down from a street sign (overheard: "He’s not naked. Bo-ring!"), or a posse of cheerful girls walking around with jingle bells attached to needles pierced into their upper arms ("Oh yeah, the bell girls, they’re here every year"), or random outdoor blow jobs, or huge setups where people are invited to spank or get spanked for charity, or a rather upset-looking leatherman handcuffed to a chain-link fence (was he a bad boy?), or the ever-extravagant Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence (mainly leathermen who do insanely fabulous drag to raise money for the community), or nearly that much naked boob of all genders. Really, it was a lovely day. Throw in a few fun gropes of the slippery latex-clad friends I ran into, a very enjoyable half-hour watching a row of bootblacks industriously at work (oh, how I wish I’d had time to get mine done! argh!), and a visit to the 900-square-foot public women-only dungeon set up by the Exiles, SF’s leatherdyke group (I’m still cursing the fact that I and my lovely date showed up just as they were starting to tear it down - damn, damn, damn)… and, well, it’s hard to say the day was anything but wonderful. The next one’s only three hundred and sixty-something days away…!

Alcatraz was great. Considering that while it was in operation, it had a reputation for being the cruelest prison in the entire US penitentiary system, I felt bizarrely zen during my visit there. There was golden sunlight filtering through the prison bars and there were gardens outside the concrete recreation area and we were surrounded by gorgeous blue water with a stunning view of the city… I guess it would have been different if I’d been locked in there with no access to the outside, but on its own, the island is pretty beautiful. I went into one of the solitary confinement cells and I thought to myself… hmmm… alone for a few days in the dark… I would sleep and do yoga and exercise and write stories in my head and sing and masturbate and… I dunno. Maybe after a couple of weeks I’d be going crazy, but the idea of being there wasn’t unpleasant. I had to kind of shake myself to remember that solitary is more like
torture than meditation!

In addition, I had purchased a new cane (nasty SM toy, not walking stick) at Folsom the day before and it had completely not occurred to me that I’d be spending the day in a public place before getting back to P’s to put it in my luggage - so rather than freak out the passengers or have the security folks think I was carrying a weapon, I ended up sticking it down the leg of my jeans for the whole tour. A very odd reminder of how kink and vanilla don’t always mix. I felt like I was smuggling something, and in truth you can hurt someone pretty badly with a cane if you know how - I mean, I could conceivably use it for self-defense in the right situation - but how would I ever have explained that I’d only ever use it for pleasure? So strange!

Monday night’s book launch was pretty cool. The crowd was really interesting - how many cities are there where you can go to a book launch on a Monday night and meet a dominatrix with triple-G boobs in head-to-toe purple latex and corsetry - with nobody even blinking because they’re all some version of freakishness themselves? I felt so at home. Stephen Elliott’s reading was good, and so was Carol’s. The launch party was for Elliott’s recently published new book entitled My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up, in which all the SM and sex scenes are apparently true. In the piece he read, his girlfriend/domme says to him, "When you write, you make yourself sound so damaged." And, well, he does. Which is why I chose not to buy the book - I flipped through it and it seemed to focus much more on his wrenchingly awful childhood and adolescence than on the enjoyable catharsis of BDSM, and if I want a stroke book, I’m not too interested in child abuse, thanks. Nevertheless he’s a very good writer, so if the sordid details of his life (fictionalized, I think?) appeal to your inner voyeur, by all means check it out.

And now, I’m back on the East Coast, sitting at a friend’s computer and thinking how rainy Toronto feels a lot less like vacation than sunny San Fran. (Not that I was technically on vacation, but it’s always good when a slow work week lines up with a visit to Cali.) That being said, there’s some fun stuff going on here too - among other things I’m aiming to attend yet another book launch/reading (yep, they’re kind of addictive) tonight at the Toronto Women’s Bookstore, this one for Jean Bobby Noble’s new book Sons of the Movement: FtMs Risking Incoherence on a Post-Queer Cultural Landscape, which promises to rearticulate FtM masculinity "as an alternative and pro-feminist embodiment of non-phallic masculinity" while attacking the cultural construction of whiteness. Yowza. Brain food! Mmm!

I suppose I should make good on that statement that I’m really not on vacation, and get back to my editing job. There are a few more posts in the offing though, as there usually are when I’ve been away for a few days… stay tuned!

Well, here I am in the land of queer and kinky: San Francisco. Why aren’t the streets paved with leather?

I arrived late on Wednesday night following an uneventful trip - well, aside from the late departure, turbulent air, new regulations barring the transportation of anything liquid or gel-like in one’s carry-on luggage (hello dehydration!), bitchy flight attendant, crying baby, painful ear-popping and luggage mix-up. Really, when you put it all together, it sounds kind of like a bad experience, but it wasn’t. Just an occasion for me to catch up on some reading - I think I made the lady next to me feel a bit uncomfortable by perusing Riki Wilchins’ book Queer Theory, Gender Theory, whose cover features a photo (of the author?) sporting an epilated bare male chest, lipstick and hoop earrings. Unfortunately, the cover’s subtle public shit-disturbing value aside, the book itself isn’t too impressive so far - lots of great ideas but strung together incoherently. It’s rare that I have to go back over a paragraph three times to figure out what the point of it was - which is one thing when you’re trying to wrap your brain around Foucault (brilliant but wordy), but quite another when it’s just because the work is poorly written (or poorly edited, not wanting to assume here).

It’s funny how I’m starting to get used to travelling now. A couple of years ago it was thrilling, the packing, the planning, the process of getting on the plane. Even going through customs had its naughty little appeal, given that when I travel it’s usually to go somewhere queer, like a conference or other event, and it’s fun to see what border guards do with that information once they request it. I’ve almost looked forward to the possibility of being searched and having them come across the SM gear or sex toys that I inevitably pack - a lot of people worry about this, but I think it’d be lots of fun to have the opportunity to do as many of my friends and acquaintances have, and make the guards more embarrassed than you are. ("What’s THIS for?" "It’s for sex. Careful, it might still be sticky." Heh heh.) Last week, when I saw T off at the airport for his move to Seattle, we both grinned and winked at each other when we spotted a very hot young spiky-haired butch dyke in the customs area - search me, baby! (It’s so much fun to be with a boy who has the same taste in women as I do.) She was there again this time, but sadly I didn’t have the privilege of going through her metal detector. On the other hand, the very queeny man who processed me complimented me on my combat boots, which is always nice. And odd. Most guys only notice four-inch pumps, queeny ones included.

It’s been an uneventful trip so far too. I spent yesterday totally screwed up from keeping odd hours the week prior and being jetlagged and confused about time zones - OK, T is now in the same time zone as me, but not the same state; B is now 10 hours difference instead of 7; my platonic life partner, D, is 3 hours difference instead of right next door; my cell phone decided to display West Coast time instead of East Coast time as it has in the past; my roommate’s laptop is an hour fast; and my head hurts! With that and a software screwup, it wasn’t the most productive of days. But it was fun to go out for dinner last night with P, my SF honey whom I’m visiting, and two of his three other girlfriends, J (his live-in primary) and M1. (We tried to get hold of M2 as well but it would appear that she and her honey were busy.) We started referring to ourselves as The Harem over vegetarian Chinese.

It’s a new twist for me, this particular experience of poly. I’ve never been someone else’s secondary partner before. I kinda like it. I suppose there are lots of ways it could go wrong, but it feels good in this particular set of circumstances - P and I don’t need to see each other every two days to feel connected, and when we do it’s much fun and then it’s back to e-mail and phone calls until the next time. It’s not without its challenges, but all in all, easy breezy.

While it’s been slow so far in the city of freaks, that’s going to change awfully soon. This evening, I’m attending the opening reception for Midori’s photography exhibit at Femina Potens, a very funky women/trans non-profit gallery here. The exhibit is called "Beefcake by Cheesecake" and features photos of hot gay dudes in bondage taken by, well, hot femme women who like to put hot gay dudes in bondage (Midori being one of two exhibitors). I love the concept! I’ll then be checking out the afterparty at El Rio, whose website promises, "For us, there are no genders too obscure and no names too difficult to pronounce." Wow. How many bars have you met that advertise that way on their home page? I’m really looking forward to this! Prior to the gallery opening, J and I will be going lube shopping at Good Vibrations - just the kind of thing I like to do with my partners’ other partners. Let’s hope I can hold back from going on a book-buying spree - last time I visited this town I came away with 36 additions to my collection, and this time I don’t have the kind and tolerant T with me to pack half my acquisitions into his luggage when it doesn’t fit into mine.

Tomorrow night, there’s a spoken word event called "Perverts Put Out!" at a place called CounterPULSE! in the Mission district, with erotic readings by Carol Queen (I promise I will post if I manage to get her into bed! Then, as B pointed out on the phone yesterday, I can call up my partners and say "Guess what, now you’re four degrees removed from Kinsey!"), Simon Sheppard, Lori Selke and a few other big names in the pervy writing world. The profits go to Carol Queen’s Center for Sex and Culture (where one day I dream of being an intern).

Following that, P and I will be hitting the Citadel, SF’s big dungeon, which is hosting a 27-hour play party in honour of Folsom Fair. I’m more than a little peeved that the Exiles, SF’s leatherdyke group, moved their party from Friday night (post-gallery-opening) to Saturday night, because that means if I want to hang out with P I have to skip the dykes, and if I want to be with the dykes I have to ditch P, neither option being entirely appealing. I’m very into the women-only spaces and wouldn’t change ‘em for the world, but I just wish that the mixed-gender ones weren’t all so hetero - it’s going to be very weird to play with P, who’s confirmedly and visibly queer, in a space that’s full of married middle-aged straights, no matter how cool and open-minded they are. Then again, it might be fun to be the only genderbent people in the place - I’m not really an exhibitionist, but sometimes it’s fun to incorporate a bit of shock value into public play. And I suppose you never know who might show up; it is Folsom after all, we can’t be the only freaks among freaks. Anyway, I suppose I’ll just have to come to San Francisco again and time things so that I get to hang out with the leatherdykes then!

Sunday is the fair itself. Folsom Street Fair attracts as many kinksters as Montreal Pride attracts queers, and then some, so I imagine it’ll be one helluva ride. My local friends tell me that it’s not uncommon to be yanked into a temporary play space when you least expect it and find yourself in the middle of some random act of kink, so the idea is to play the day by ear. I’m sure I’ll have adventures to post about by Monday, but I’ve booked myself a little solo cruise to Alcatraz for that afternoon so the report might have to wait. All my SF friends have harped on me to get to Alcatraz at some point, and I didn’t manage to fit it in last time I was here, so now’s my chance! Nothing like visiting a prison with an international reputation as a hellhole to cap off a week in sunny happy San Fran.

And on that note, I’m signing off. Gotta go make myself pretty, find a bus schedule, and go exploring.

The interesting news tidbits just keep pouring in these days!

First of all, a piece of gossip: I hear that Serge et Réal Librairies, the queer bookstore that opened a year ago on Amherst, is finally starting to actively look into beefing up their English-language inventory. This is a very good thing, because last year they were full of good intentions but all they had in the English department was a bit of leftover stock from L’Androgyne (may it rest in peace) and a few secondhand singles. The rest was all French and all gay, with no L, B, T or anything else that might be equally interesting. I hear they’re celebrating their one-year anniversary on the 27th - if anyone stops by the store for the wine & cheese, please check out their shelves and let me know if they’ve got any new and exciting English-language stuff!

Next up, volunteer recruitment. Both Gay Line and Gai Écoute are recruiting for their fall volunteer training sessions, and both groups are actively seeking to increase their numbers of female volunteers. So if ever you’ve had a hankering to do hotline work, especially if you’re a chick, check their websites for e-mail addresses or call them (Gay Line at 514 866-5090 or Gai Écoute at 514 866-6788).

And of course, there’s always the importance of partying. Especially when it’s for a good cause, ya? And GLAM is a good cause - if for nothing else than having the coolest name ever for a queer group. Seriously, GLAM is the local group for Asian queers, and they really rock. So go check ‘em out on Friday as per the following announcement.

***

NEW WAVE, NEW ASIA
A dance party to raise funds for GLAM (LGBTQ Asians of Montreal)

Move your feet to New Wave, Techno-pop, Old School rap, and Asian dance
music! Enjoy special performances! Win prizes for best New Wave hair, make-up, and outfit!

Where: Inferno Clubmix, 1592 Ste Catherine East
When: 9 p.m., Friday, September 22, 2006
Price: $5 GLAM members , $7 students (free for Dawson College students), $10 general.

Come and have an amazing time!

Co-sponsored by Queer McGill, Concordia’s Sexual Diversity Alliance (SDA), UQAM’s Regroupement Étudiant dans la Diversité Sexuelle (R.E.D.S.), and the University of Montreal’s l’Alternative.

***

Now we arrive at politics. I’m snipping the full announcement, but basically, the same-sex marriage question is potentially going to be reopened in Parliament very very soon. So if you’re the sort of person who’d rather they just bloody left it alone already - i.e., keep the status quo, no more debate, queers can get married, and if you don’t like it, stuff it - you may want to check out the Equal Marriage Coalition website below and fire off a few e-mails to your MPs through their handy-dandy automatic system.

***

"The fall session of Parliament begins today. That means we’re in the home stretch leading to a vote to re-open the divisive equal marriage debate, which Prime Minister Harper has promised will take place this fall.

"We believe we’ll win this vote, and put an end to the threat that now hangs over LGBT people and all Canadians who believe in equality. However, equality opponents know this is their last chance, and they are going all out to pressure MPs. They wrongly say equal marriage is a threat to children and to religious freedom and that Bill C-38 was rushed through Parliament without proper study.

"According to a September 4 Hill Times story, an alliance of 13 traditional marriage, family and religious advocacy groups will launch a 15-point lobbying campaign beginning on Sept. 18. The alliance will bring religious leaders, local leaders, and political leaders to Ottawa to meet with their respective MPs, and will have prayer rallies in front of MP offices across the country.

"Please go to www.equal-marriage.ca/election.php and contact your MP or all MPs. Our action website makes it simple."

***

More news: Despite being generally evil and wanting to reopen the same-sex marriage debate, apparently Stephen Harper does not eat babies. Y’know, it’s been a long time since a serious news article made me laugh until I cried. For some reason this story strikes me as one of those things that could only happen quite this way in Canada - in the States there’d be twelve lawsuits taking place over it. Anyway. Read and laugh. (Thanks to D for posting this link on his charming blog.)

Geeky queer things to do this month include - well, an entire month. I am way impressed with UQAM (Université du Québec à Montréal) all of a sudden. Last year I took part in a study on bisexuality being conducted by a research team there, and that was pretty darn cool. Now they’ve created a new queer group called REDS, which stands for Regroupement étudiant dans la diversité sexuelle, which translates as "student sexual diversity group." REDS is holding a full month of workshops and activities on sexual diversity starting this week; each week has a theme, and some of their activities look totally awesome!

Of course I’m totally stoked about the geeky lectures, some of which I will have to miss (grr!) because I can’t be on two coasts at once. They have lunchtime and evening speakers talking about LGBT ghettoization, queer youth networks, bisexuality and heterosexism, queer immigration issues, the history of queer theatre, queer media representation, issues faced by trans sex workers (this one totally piques my interest because in addition to MTF transsexuals and transvestites, the description mentions "trans-boy" sex workers, which I have never before seen mentioned in the context of sex work - I’m fascinated!), religion, marriage, Middle Eastern queers, and social equality work. They also have various creative workshops, art exhibits and social events. Phew! I don’t think I’ve ever seen a program this impressive outside a national conference, and this shit is all free. Very impressive! I’m definitely going to check out some of the lectures in October when I get back from my travels. The detailed program is posted in four weekly sections on their site, so if you understand French, go take a look!

Oh, just for a treat: check out this groupblog called Feminist Allies. It’s a site where feminist dudes dissect their own privilege. For the most part I’m pretty impressed with their thoughts!

And that’s the queer news at 3:11 a.m. (Oh jeez, I still have an article to finish writing before I go to bed. Crikey, this blogging thing is distracting.)

Oh! Oh! Post-script! This is my 150th post. It would appear that I average about 22 posts a month, and with most of ‘em hovering around the 1,000-word mark (often more, sometimes less), that’s almost 150,000 words. Which is at least the length of your average novel. Fuck, maybe I should get my ass working on an actual book one of these days! At least now I’ve proven to myself that I can produce that much blather…

So there’s this "how kinky are you" quiz that’s been circulating online, and I finally decided to take it. I kinda grew out of quizzes in my early teens when I realized that most of them were completely inane ("Are you a good friend? Are you fun in bed?" etc., etc.), and even the good ones rarely told me anything surprising about myself. But this one seems to keep popping up, and I figured it might be fun to regress to adolescence and see how my personal kink gets reflected back to me through someone else’s arbitrary lens.

Okay, straight to the punch line: with a maximum score of 1,000, I landed at 751 points, which apparently rates me as being "you live and breath kinky!" - a rating which seems relatively accurate aside from the glaring spelling error.

(Quick aside: do you folks find it irritating that I’m constantly carping on grammar and spelling in what’s supposed to be a sex blog? I hope not… I don’t know if I can help it. Maybe I should take a "how obnoxious an editor are you" test and see how likely it is that I’m pissing people off. For the moment I’ll just excuse my bad behaviour by pointing at the "geek" part of "sex geek.")

So apparently I’m pretty darn kinky. 75% or so. (Is the other quarter vanilla? If so, which quarter is it?) Like I said… these tests rarely surprise me.

What did surprise me was some of the reasons why I make that score. Three questions in particular that made me raise an eyebrow: 1) Have you ever been attracted to someone of the same sex? 2) Have you ever had sex with someone of the same sex? and 3) Would you let someone of the same sex go down on you if you didn’t have to touch them or return the favor? (American spelling this time! Okay, okay, ball-gagging the internal editor now…)

How fascinating that you effectively get kink points for being bisexual or gay. Gee, can you tell it was a heterosexual who wrote the test? I mean, "let someone" of the same sex go down on you, if you didn’t "have to" touch them? Where’s the frickin’ fun in that? Why would you bother gettin’ down with someone if you had to mentally block out their gender in order to enjoy it? That’s a pretty big part of someone to try to ignore while they’ve got their tongue in your crotch! How dehumanizing. I almost answered no as a matter of principle - if someone’s gonna go down on me, you better believe I’m going to touch them at some point.

I guess when you’re nominally straight, the idea of same-sex sexual activity might seem transgressive in some way, and thus kinky. It’s like that titillating no-man’s-land where you might venture if you had that one extra drink, if your honey was out of town, if nobody was likely to find out, if you know you’re straight so a little dabbling doesn’t mean anything, if you could pass it off as one of those things you just have to try once… or whatever other excuse you can come up with to happily maintain your firm stance as a Confirmed Yet Laudably Open-Minded Heterosexual.

Really, it’s kind of insulting. I mean, if some chickie wants to muff-dive on a lark because "girls have such soft skin" and anyway her boyfriend will get all excited about the idea, or some dude decides that if he gets to blow his load down someone’s throat it’s not that much of a big deal if said throat happens to have an Adam’s apple and a five o’clock shadow on it - well, who am I to say it’s wrong? You go, girl. Get all experimental. Have a blast. I may not be interested in being the subject of that sort of experiment for the entertainment of straight people, but I don’t condemn it. I just wish people didn’t get so self-congratulatory about it. I mean, so what. You made out with someone of the same sex. People have been doing it for centuries. It doesn’t make you extra-spicy-exciting. It makes you human.

I mean think of the logic of the thing. Picture it: You’re a girl. You grow up not being super interested in boys, except maybe to play street hockey with. You never really understand the dating thing all your friends in high school seem to be so excited about. You have a couple of raging crushes on the popular girls, but whatever, doesn’t everybody? Eventually you come across a girl who decides you’re cute, and that makes you blush and stammer, and you end up kissing one day after you run into each other at the Dairy Queen, and all of a sudden the world comes into sharp focus. You’re a lesbian! So you stock up on your Ani DiFranco records, start reading Sarah Waters, cut your hair short, go to college, join the campus queer group, pierce your nose, get a girlfriend, break up, get another (or twelve), figure out how where the G-spot is located, graduate, get a job at a women’s centre, start doing the Pride circuit every summer, meet a hottie, do the U-Haul thing, buy a house and a car, get a cat and live with them happily ever after.

How is any of that kinky? With a few allowances for cultural specificity (and yes, I know that not every dyke follows the exact same path), that’s just a pretty typical vanilla life from what I can tell. It happens to include a deviation from the statistical norm in terms of the gender of sexual object choice, but that’s hardly in and of itself a major plunge into the uncharted waters of sexual adventure.

Or, in short: straight guys eat pussy. Why is it kinky if a girl does the same? (Gawd, I know, it’s bizarre for me of all people to be leaping to the defence of vanilla people.)

First of all it’s a question of accuracy. Speaking as a Confirmed Kinky Bisexual, I ask you to please believe me when I say that sex between women is not always kinky. It’s not extra-exciting just because it’s with a girl. (Or if it is, maybe you should reconsider whether you’re actually attracted to men, or at least reconsider the lover(s) you’re with.) For me, at least, the mere fact of having a naked girl in my bed (as opposed to a naked guy) does not by any stretch guarantee that we’ll get up to anything outside the realm of vanilla. And you know, that’s OK with me! Vanilla sex can be lots of fun. In my opinion kissing is one of the greatest pastimes known to humankind, cuddling rocks, and - well, I like orgasms, and I’m not generally too picky about how I get there. One doesn’t always require a bucket of lube, a scalpel and two pairs of restraints to make a fun evening.

Second, it’s about stereotypes and objectification. Most queers I know do not see themselves as exotic creatures whose bedroom practices should be held up as awe-inspiring examples of extreme sexual experimentation. Really, most of us just want to get laid like anyone else, and it’s just a question of using the body parts at hand to make that happen. No big mystery. "Oooh, what do lesbians do in bed?" Uh, finger-fuck and eat each other out. Same thing straight people do, minus the cock. What did you think happened? They grew three extra hands and masturbated each others’ nasal passages?

To hold up same-sex sexual behaviour as inherently erotically transgressive is to exoticize people who never asked to be made into a contorted projection of other folks’ repression. It makes queers into "those strange people over there who do those disgusting things… that I might want to try, but only if I can run back to my safe little acceptable life once I’m done." It creates a division where there isn’t one. To borrow some academic language for a sec, it creates an Other ("different") who, in the age-old tradition of binary power dynamics, is opposed to the Subject ("normal") and comes out on the political short end of the stick. It’s hard to be exotic and still be respected; it’s hard to be fetishized and still be seen as human. In short, the equation is not only inaccurate, it’s disrespectful.

Third - and here’s where I stop championing vanilla sex and get back to my roots as a pervert - the equation of same-sex sex with kink confuses the definition what is truly kinky. Certainly, there’s no arbitrary definition out there as to what counts as kinky in the first place - it’s not like I can pull out my handy board-approved list and point to all the activities that made the cut. But I’d say a generally agreed-upon broad definition would include sexual (and sometimes non-sexual) activities that involve consensual power exchange, "extreme" physical sensations (i.e. pain or other unusual types of sensual stimulation), and/or the use of fetish objects (i.e. traditionally non-sexualized body parts or items). In other words, kink is about transgression - not necessarily enormous transgression, but transgression nonetheless. And tons of same-sex couples out there don’t go near any of those things, don’t see themselves as transgressive or kinky, and would rightfully resent being labelled as something they aren’t. (Please note I’m not a fan of queers who spend a lot of time distancing themselves from leatherfolk to avoid being politically "tarnished." But I do understand the desire to be seen for what you are, and not to have people assume you are something you’re not. And I believe there are ways to make the distinction without basing it on misunderstanding and hostility.)

Of course this is definition has very blurry edges, and there are lots of grey areas; for example, I’m personally quite sure that a whole lot of people who don’t really think of themselves as kinky still play at the edges of it (by the above definition) with no qualms. Blindfolds, light bondage, biting and scratching, spanking, light power play during sex, and so forth - these activities won’t automatically send anyone tumbling over the edge and into the chasm of St. Andrew’s crosses and single-tail whips, but in my books they’re still at least a step or two over the vanilla line.

But the point is, any people of any gender combination can play in the realm of kink - whether it’s two men, a guy and a girl, or a pair of women. Kink is a great equalizer. One of the things I like most about the kink world is that if I’m in a public dungeon, it can be filled with people of every conceivable orientation and the common point is our desire to transgress the boundaries of "normal" pleasure and seek out our satisfaction on the edges. Which is not the case when I go to a lesbian bar. The common factor in a dyke bar is gender preference, nothing else. In that setting, I can kiss a girl and nobody will blink, but if I want to string someone up and paddle their ass until it’s purple, you better believe it’s not going to happen in that same lesbian bar - for that I need to find a dungeon. On the other hand, I can bring a lesbian to the dungeon and kiss her, and nobody will blink there either - a kiss between people of any genders would be considered really quite banal compared to what Bob and Joan are doing to Ted in the corner over there with the plastic wrap and the taser gun.

Apart from the problematic same-sex questions, the rest of the kink test was all right, though honestly it was a bit vanilla. I’m sure I lost points for not liking to videotape my intimate activities and not being into "consensual bestiality" (I’d love to know how they define "consent" here!), but they didn’t ask me if I like fisting or needle play or caning or foot worship or strap-on sex (does strap-on sex count as kinky? hmmm, another debate!) so I’m not sure the 751 is truly representative. If they’d only asked the right questions, I might have qualified for the 901-1,000 point slot and merited the honour of being in "Super Freak Alert!!" range. Ah well. I guess I’ll take my 751 and be happy with that. I guess there’s only so much you can expect a quiz to tell you, after all.

Oh, fer fuck’s sake. Check out this article. It’s so devoid of meaningful content that I can’t fathom why it was even published, and the reporter makes a complete ass of herself by clearly displaying her stunning lack of research and her total misunderstanding of the BDSM world. Check out just this little quote:

"’Individuals who practice dominance and submission usually have a ’safe-word’ if they want their partner to stop inflicting pain; therefore, it is labeled consensual,’ Wagner said. ‘Individuals who practice masochism desire to give total control of themselves to someone else and feel sincere pain. This is nonconsensual, or "real acts."’"

Um… just for starters, don’t those last two sentences directly contradict each other?

I’d write a bitchy comment to the site to pick apart the many, many things wrong with this article, but Susan Wright, spokesperson for the US-based National Coalition for Sexual Freedom, beat me to the punch and has much better credentials than I do. Too bad most people won’t look past the first information they see on the topic, even when it’s written by someone who appears to be thoroughly misinformed and who has interviewed someone else who also appears to be thoroughly misinformed.

I’m gonna go pound my head on the wall a bit before going to bed. Oh, oops, maybe that would make me a masochist. Hmmm. Is it possible for self-abuse to be non-consensual? Maybe I’m not a masochist after all, since clearly I want the pain. AAaaaghhhh.

Sad news of the day: my pet lizard, Fluffy, finally kicked the bucket a few days ago after faithfully remaining at my side for the past eight years. It’s a little hard to develop an intimate relationship with a lizard, so I’m not exactly traumatized at the event. But it’s nonetheless a strangely symbolic event. For starters, it’s weird to realize how much changed for me during the little critter’s life span. I originally inherited him from my ex-boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend’s kid nephew, who’s now probably old enough to be going to bars (gah - now that’ll make a girl feel old!). I’ve since severed my friendship with said ex-boyfriend; he went born-again Christian and it was pretty ugly.

I’ve also come out of the closet, seen more than one significant relationship come and go, found the SM scene, moved from the culturally barren West Island to the thriving borough of Verdun, graduated from university, embarked on my career, started my own business and become a sex geek. Not necessarily in that order. With very few exceptions, the people who were significant in my life at the time Fluffy entered it are no longer around. In fact, most of my nearest and dearest only met Fluffy once he’d already been renamed, after starting out as Dart - my ex-girlfriend, who’s generally phobic about scaly creatures, decided she could make friends with him if he had a cuddly-sounding name.

It also seems like Fluffy’s death is taking place at a time when many things are ending for me. I’ve spent the past few months letting go of various volunteer and other commitments - I finished my last classes for the Sexuality Minor at Concordia, resigned from Gay Line after six years of volunteer work, groomed replacements for myself with Tip of the Tongue and left the group in their competent hands. This week, T moved away to Seattle, where he’ll be staying for the next ten months or so to pursue his studies, so we’re embarking on the challenge of a newly long-distance relationship after two and a half years of barely spending more than a few days apart. I’m now facing the weird situation of being effectively single for all practical purposes (y’know, movie dates, making out, whatever) while in reality having romantic relationships with three different partners - one permanently in San Francisco, one in Egypt until next summer, and now one in Seattle for the school year.

And you thought poly people got laid a lot. Nah. We just rack up huge fucking phone bills.

So if all endings make room for new beginnings, what’s about to begin for me? I’m not entirely sure. For the moment, my topmost guesses are work on a master’s degree application (yes! one day I will be a truly overeducated sex geek as opposed to one who’s eternally parked in undergrad!), a return to the gym to see if I can find my abs again (*poke poke*… you in there somewhere?), a lot of quiet time for reading and writing, and travel, travel, travel. Hey, the long-distance thing does have its advantages - I may not have hotties to hold hands with in Montreal, but I’ve got three wonderful excuses to go jet-set!

All that being said, I don’t pretend to know what the future looks like any more than I would have predicted the myriad changes Fluffy would see me through when he first entered my life nine years ago. I’m just going to trust the universe to take me where it thinks I should go. So far it’s been one helluva ride.

On a more practical note, I’ve just come back from giving Fluffy a rather undignified burial in an outdoor garbage can. At least it has a scenic view of the water. I dunno, I’m not one to stand on ceremony when it comes to such things. Maybe if we’d spent more quality time talking?

Today, I had the good fortune of speaking to a wonderfully diverse group of people as part of a SAR weekend. SAR stands for Sexuality Attitudes Reassessment. The weekends are run here and there all over North America, and a local sex educator named Stephanie Mitelman runs the ones here in Montreal once or twice a year. They’re aimed at professionals and students working with (or planning to work with) clients who may present alternative sexualities, the idea being to help these service providers get a sense of their own sexuality-related prejudices and misconceptions with the aim of dispelling them so they can better meet their clients’ needs. Stephanie’s great, and she’s had me come and speak at SARs two or three times now, plus in a couple of her classes at Concordia. Much fun indeed.

So this afternoon I got to tell my weird-ass complicated coming-out/life-in-general story to a group of people including prison inmate counsellors, McGill undergrads, group home crisis intervention workers, health care education professionals and other assorted folks, who had travelled from as far as Alaska, Hawaii and the Northwest Territories for the privilege of having their minds pried open by listening to queers and other freaks talk about their lives.

Y’know, sometimes I think I’m normal.

I live in a happy little queer/kinky/poly bubble. In my world, it’s really pretty banal for my new roommate to bring home two girls on her first night living here and later to generously offer to share her sex toys with me if I like the look of them ("this one’s great, it’s made of Lucite so you can see right into the person if you hold it just right!")… for one of my long-distance boyfriend’s four other girlfriends to want to set up a date to meet me when I visit him… to organize an all-girl sadomasochistic gang-bang as a birthday gift for a friend… to date girls who wear suits and guys who wear skirts, and for the idea of the opposite to be almost weird… to stay the night with friends who keep a fresh sharps container and six flavours of condoms (including a female one) in their guest room as a matter of course… for my butch dyke friend to get mistaken for a man in the Village and casually offered a blow job by some guy on the street, and for me to be instantly jealous ("I want an anonymous gay blow job! Pick me!")… to get casually propositioned by my boyfriend’s friends’ brother’s girlfriend… to have my latest houseguest’s thank-you note include an apology that she didn’t have time to lick my stilettos clean while she was here, the understanding, of course, being that they would have been on my feet at the time… to find myself attracted to a person of indeterminate gender without it even crossing my mind to worry about what that means for my sexual identity… to casually discuss differing preferences in porn, strap-on harnesses, bondage rope and crotch hair grooming habits with my best buddies over a Friday-night drink… to spend eight hours in bed naked with T without ever actually doing the standard "tab A into slot B" kind of sex, and for us only to notice and giggle about the fact that we didn’t "technically" have sex long after the twenty-third orgasm has passed, the toys are washed up, the bedsheets changed and we’ve moved on to cuddles and vegetarian chili and a Hitchcock flick… for the person I’m playing with to have both a boy name and a girl name, and for her not to really be too picky about which one gets used when or which pronoun is matched up with which moniker, so long as by the end of the night he’s covered in bruises and lipstick… and so on, and so forth. This is my life. I fucking love it. I surround myself with people who share this life with me. It becomes normal. It is normal.

But every once in a while, I have an experience that shows me exactly how far my life is from that arbitrary state most people out there call "normalcy", and by extension so are the lives of the people I’m closest to. Today, for example, as part of my life story I mentioned that my very first girlfriend figured out, within a couple of days of us getting together, that she was trans and wanted to become a man. Lucky for me I had done a lot of reading and had some wonderful trans folks in my life who could help me figure out how best to be a supportive SOFFA.

The next audience question was, "When you’re around a trans person, how do you figure out if you’re supposed to treat them like a man or like a woman?"

I realized at that point that I was completely mystified… I had to rewind my brain back about a decade to get to a place where I could remember that I am supposed to treat men and women differently. It’s been so long since someone’s gender was a factor in how I treated them that I had to work to even remember what the old rules (old to me, that is) are. The experience was something like when you flip through your high school year book and see your old hairdo, which of course you haven’t thought about in a dog’s age, and you shudder at the thought that you ever walked out of the house sporting such a monstrosity. That weird combination of revulsion and nostalgia - yeah, that’s how I feel about the idea of gender codes.

So, if she’s sucking my cock, is she treating me like a man? If I hold the door for him, am I treating him like a woman? What if I trade off with someone on whose orifices get penetrated, or on who does the dishes or pays for the movie or wears the skirt? Gawd, are there still people out there who decide this kind of thing based on what (wholly inadequate) gender box they check on a government form? That reality feels like a lifetime ago. The theory of gender equality translated into everyday practice for me so long ago that it’s hard to recall what it was like to "just know" the difference between men and women. I think I’ve unlearned this one so completely that I was almost at a loss for words to respond to the question.

"How do you know what pronoun to use?" was another question. Umm… if you don’t think you can read the cues right, you ask the person. Simple, no? The idea that a trans person should be seen as anything other than their gender of choice is also somewhere off in the dim recesses of the past.

It’s funny that people seem to think that once you disturb the categories of male (= masculine) and female (= feminine), some huge element of society is going to crumble, and everyone will just look the same (complete androgyny), and we won’t know who to hit on anymore, and the sexual tension between the (traditional) genders will somehow drip away and leave us with some kind of bland cardboard version of sexuality where nothing’s exciting anymore. In my experience, disturbing the categories in fact does nothing of the sort - it’s exactly that disturbance which creates a kaleidoscope of possibilities for attraction instead of just one. I just don’t see why that means anyone should be treated differently based on their gender.

It’s not that I’ve become blind to gender difference. Quite the opposite, in fact. My life has more genders in it than ever - genders are all around me and I proudly carry at least ten or twelve inside me, too. I’ve got a finely-tuned sense of gender differentiation and lordy, but it’s fun to put it to work. I can tell you the difference between M, who’s a butch dyke, and S, who’s a fag in a butch dyke’s body, and B, who’s a butchy sporty dyke who’s also faggy but only when she dresses up, and N, who’s a sporty dyke but doesn’t really fit on the butch/femme continuum. I can explain the nuances between the terms "dyke" and "lesbian", between "femme" and "feminine," between "transgender" and "genderqueer." I can tell you about the vast world of difference between J, who’s a boi, and D, who’s a boy. I can lay out the slight but significant variations that lead along a bumpy continuum from F, who’s a femme fag, to T, who’s a girly boy, to G, who’s a sweater queen, to P, who’s a drag queen, to R, who’s not really queeny but likes to play the part sometimes (probably thanks to all that opera he sings), to S, who looks like a fag and is definitely queeny but who’s really just a big ol’ slutty bottom and doesn’t really care about the pink bits so long as someone else is on top. I can see the distinctions between C, who’s the sort of butch who looks hot in a slinky black dress, and H, who may have long hair but who’d be as awkward in a dress as a football player would be in go-go boots. I can tell you why this tranny cowboy is a top and that one’s a bottom, and who they might switch for and why. I can see clear as day that for bio-boy P, who’s not gay, wearing a skirt is not drag, whereas for bio-boy K, who is gay, it definitely would be. I can lay out the general lines that are drawn between cross-dressers and transvestites and transgendered people and transsexual people, and why they don’t all necessarily get along or have the same politics, and how some of those terms are used interchangeably or controversially depending on community and geography. I can tell you why an MSM isn’t gay even if he fucks guys, and why some bisexuals are queer and others aren’t. Though I’m not an expert, I can usually manage to do a decent job explaining why the Jamaican concept of an "all-sexual" person isn’t exactly the same thing as the Native concept of a Two-Spirit person. I can even maybe begin to explain why gender doesn’t work the same way in French as it does in English, let alone in a vast number of other languages.

So with all that in mind, I realized today just how far I have to stretch to get back to a place where I can give an appropriate answer to the question, "How do you figure out if you’re supposed to treat a trans person like a man or like a woman?" An answer that’s not condescending or rude, but that paints a picture of a world where the very asking of such a question would be absurd. An answer that educates and doesn’t shut down. An answer that respects someone’s desire to understand and gives them information they can actually digest. Trying to come up with that kind of answer takes work; it’s not necessarily an easy task to try and build bridges between the world I used to inhabit and the one I’ve moved to, even when it’s something I’ve been doing for years now. Sometimes the task seems frighteningly huge, especially if I extrapolate from a single question in a single classroom to an entire world whose basic assumptions I don’t share.

In a lot of ways, this is a lonely place to be, but on the other hand it’s a place of incredible richness and beauty. I feel like at this point I’m accustomed to seeing the world in hi-def wide-screen Technicolor with surround sound, and 785 24-hour channels to choose from… so much so that I take it for granted. I wouldn’t say I look down on people who see the world on tiny black-and-white TV screens with no remote control, and a choice of Channel 12 or Channel 3. Or at least I certainly try not to. But every once in a while, when I sit in their living rooms for a time, I realize what an incredible privilege it is to be in mine.

I’ve been a member of the Erotica Readers and Writers Association for a couple of years now, and they are such lovely folks - every week, they unfailingly fill my inbox with the most eclectic collection of submission calls you can imagine. Normally I either delete them or file them in the "if ever I get around to finishing those six half-finished peices of erotic fiction or if by some miracle one of these calls matches up with a piece I’ve already written and polished" folder, but every once in a while, one of them is just too good not to be shared. In the last couple of weeks, there have been two such goodies.

The first is amazing because it makes me so fucking jealous. Why, oh why, can they not have made this an anthology for queer women? Oh, please please, come out with one of these for the girls! Of course I want to contribute to it, but more than that, I wanna read it! Sigh. Anyway, just reading the call made me grin from ear to ear, so here it is for your enjoyment:

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Sex by the Book: Gay Men’s Tales of Lit and Lust

Many of us first identified our sexuality in books: from looking up homosexual in the card catalog to fixating on those couple of lines about gay sex in Dr. Reuben or a vague blow job scene in a trashy bestseller. We like to read about sex between men, many of us write about it, and sometimes we hook up between the pages. Were you weaned on a gay classic like Dancer from the Dance, or Faggots, and then entered a gay milieu with a very different reality? Perhaps you projected a favorite literary character onto a boyfriend, met a man at OutWrite, or seduced your Milton tutor. Maybe your book club turned into an orgy, or you were bent over a hot press by a union bookbinder. Maybe you put a former lover into a story of your own with unexpected results, hooked up with a fan after a reading, or wrote a famous author and got an invitation to more than tea. Maybe you seduced a friend by reading aloud from a Victorian porn novel. Maybe you were the shy bookworm who finally had his specs-and pants-taken off by the right man. Or maybe there was just a hot tearoom in the college library; the sexual tension in bookstores and libraries can sometimes rival that of truck stops and gyms. The possibilities are endless.

For Sex by the Book we’re looking for a wide range of well-written, sexy, funny, scary, creative first person essay/erotic memoirs and stories about that steamy, intimate place where bibliophilism and satyriasis converge. These pieces may be romantic or cynical, subtly erotic or frankly explicit, humorous or touching, but they should all read like, or be cast as, compelling pieces of fiction, with careful attention to plot, pacing, setting, characterization, and dialogue.

***

And next, this one had me chortling. Not to mention thinking back to my post on queer superheroes a few weeks back.

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Superqueeroes (tentative title)

Superheroes are everywhere. Are they among the queer/lgbt community?

I want to read about original superheroes from all aspects of the queer community  drag king/queen, MTF, FTM, transgender, lesbian, gay, bisexual, butch, femme, bear, twink, genderqueer, intersex, etc.

Does your superhero receive superpowers when dressed in drag or because of the transitioning process? Does your lesbian character use her powers to fight rapists? Does your femme get her powers from her nail polish? Does your twink get his powers from surviving a gay bashing? Does your bear grow bigger and stronger to fight crime? Is your heroine a MTF superhero fighting the wimmin only community for acceptance? Give me humor, give me grit, give me dark  I’m open to differing moods. (I’m a femme. LOL). They can fight against the ex-gay movement (superhero rescues a gay forced into therapy), the Christian right wing anti-gay movement, gay marriage backlash, rapists, or the evil villain ridding the world of nail polish. Don’t be afraid to be humorous or get political, but please do so within a well-developed superhero story.

Heroes can be any race, nationality, alien, mutant, etc., but the superhero MUST be from some aspect of the queer/lgbt community. I DO NOT WANT FAN FICTION. No blatant use of trademarked characters or veiled use of them either. Original characters and plots are necessary.

***

Okay, I don’t expect everyone to share my delight with these. But you never know. Geeks, superheroes, and erotic writing - what a great combo. If you want the full submission info, check the ERWA site and look at their submissions section. I’ll just sit here and sigh happily for a while.

Agh. Y’know, you skip a few days to focus on other things, and whaddaya get? You guessed it… backlog. So, in case you couldn’t tell by the two pieces I’ve already posted, this evening’s theme will be multiple posts.

Now that longer bits are done with, time to get the local news out. Miriam, organizer extraordinaire of such events as Meow Mixes and Boudoir, mails out a monthly community newsletter, which totally rocks. I’m going to shamelessly borrow from her news, but of course I’ve picked my own favourite bits and added pithy commentary…

The first being that Montreal apparently now has its own drag king yahoo group. How fabulous! The ad reads as follows: "All practicing and aspiring Drag Kings in the Montreal area are invited to join a new yahoo group. Whether you wish to let others know about upcoming shows, to look for other Drag Kings to put together a show, to exchange drag tips or simply to socialise with your drag brothers, this is the space for you! No experience is needed… we are here to have fun, to help each other out and to put Drag Kings back on the map in Montreal. We are NOT here to compete with each other!"

The second: Harvest, the Montreal GLBT International Theatre Festival, runs from September 21-30, and apparently this year’s program includes three international productions with lesbian and transgender themes. Please note that in past years, "GLBT" has been used rather generously to characterize a festival that has been pretty much exclusively gay. Nope, not even gay and lesbian. Just gay. But at least they’re working on that little "inclusivity" detail while they’re still young instead of waiting 10 or 15 years like some organizations I know of. Unfortunately, while I’m all about supporting exactly this kind of thing, I will be leaving for San Francisco the day before the festival starts, and getting back (via Toronto and Ottawa) two days after it ends, so it looks like I’m screwed for queer theatre this fall. If any of you go check these out, please let me know what you thought of them!

So, the plays in question:

- A. Gender by Joey Hateley (TransAction Theatre, Manchester, UK)
Experimental theatre, movement, and video, this is a not so typical, yet very topical one-person show about female masculinity.

- None of the Above by Jennifer Lanier (Hawaii, USA)
A solo comedy on the weirdness of dueling ethnicities, first loves, and figuring out which box to check. The New York Times apparently reviewed it as being a "flash of beauty and inspiration… a rollicking monologue"

- Stripped and Teased by Kimberly Dark (Hawaii, USA)
Interactive spoken word performance based on real stories about women’s lives, lesbian lives, strippers lives and the absurdity of gender roles. Humerous, thought-provoking and somewhat shocking.

Last but not least, NoMorePotlucks.org has been saved from certain death by the work of one or more new volunteers. Right on! Their announcement reads as follows: "NMP has been catering to the lesbian, dyke, homo, trans, queer women’s communities for the past three years. We are a small but dedicated team and are always looking for new ideas and new contributors to make the site more dynamic, accessible and useful. We have redesigned nomorepotlucks.org to make it easier for everyone to post content - check it out! www.nomorepotlucks.org you will be able to add content to the leisure, arts or media section(s)."

Sneak preview: I’ve been offered a column on the site, which makes me all happy and wiggly. I’m not yet sure I’ll be able to take ‘em up on their very kind offer, but I sure hope to! I’ll let you know if it happens.

And that’s the queer news at, uh, 12:13 a.m.