A Witches Tale: My Dick Pic and Me.

I have always wanted to ride a vacuum cleaner with my friendz.

Last month I was sitting on the subway, bemoaning the fact that I was riding the M train and not whisking my way to Bushwich on a broom, a thought that must irritate almost all 21st century witches, when my phone buzzed in my pocket. It was a scruff message from Lion27 (I changed the name but it was ruffly that), asking “can I see your noodz”, his words not mine. With out much of a thought, being that I was lost some where between the witching hour of drunk and horny, (aka heading home alone at 3 am on a Saturday,) I send off my prick pick and went back to meditating on how much more enjoyable the world would be if everyone had access to flight via common house hold objects.

He responded, I responded, more images were exchanged, address were given, plans were set to stone like commandments, and I sighed, the sigh of a man still secretly debating between getting off two stops early to get off, or simply staying put and allowing our digital exchange to fizzle out into nothing but half held hopes, and pipe dreams that perhaps a random tumble in the sack with a stranger would become something more delicious. (Like everyone in New York these days I too am looking for winter cuddles.)

I actually love the M train

I mention in my profile that I give structural massages as part of a skills exchange. Having apparently read this, he then sent me a text saying he cuts hair, and wanted to know if I needed a trim. … the prospect of a hair cut for a massage followed by sex if we vibed was promising to me in my drunk state, yet as I debated it my mind continued to wander. Lost in the question about how to be a more fully actualized 21st century witch.

It was somewhere over the Lorimer stop, the train wrat-wrat-rattling around me, my body swaying, from the movement of my mechanized steed and rich honeyed cider, spiked by all the bottles of rum I could find, when I began to recognize the witchcraft present in this moment.

Being a witch in the real world in the 21st century means that though nothing might be as magical as you would like it to be, there is magic here all the same, you just some times have to look for it. Some times you accidentally cast a spell, or find a magical object, or brew a potion, life is like that. But I did none of those things that night. Instead, I am proud to announce, I realized that I have a familiar.

A witch and their Familiar from a YE’OLDEN TIMES line drawing.

Familiar: NOUN: A demon supposedly attending and obeying a witch, often said to assume the form of an animal.

It’s my dick pic. I was always worried it was going to be something insipid, like a toad. No offense to toads, but if I am going to have a daemon side kick which both is and is not made from the fabric of my flesh and desire, I want it to at least look real cool, and either be practical, like a ferret, or absurdly awesome like a dire wolf. Yet it turns out, that in the realm of 21st century witchcraft, your familiar might just be a dick pic, shot from a flattering angle, with good lighting, taken while you lay mostly naked on your bed. (My feet get cold, I like to wear socks, most photos of my cock, include my socks in the background.)

BACKSTORY:

See I am actually a witch, of the reclaiming tradition, and given that much of the world is mundane I rather enjoy meditations on moments where the magical and the real intersect and I am gifted new vistas, new ways of articulating my relationship to reality and space. Magic is mostly in how you choose to relate to reality. It’s an active choice. Sure, things occur which feel ‘magical’, ‘unexplainable’, ‘miraculous’. But the majority of the time it has much more to do with  seeing things as magical. In many ways it’s actively choosing to explore reality with an edge of child-esq wonder, for children, with their comparative lack of social programing, often interact with the world as if it is magic. When boiled down to its essence, I see the divisions as such; the world, both physically and socially is governed by a set of laws, (in the form of constants such as gravity, or social codes, like ‘respect your elders’) Magic is the anarchic. It’s the potential to disrupt these codes. I don’t think I have ever seen some one use magic to violate the laws of physics, but I certainly have seen magic deployed to deconstruct if not fully destruct expected social norms.

One of the most powerful ways that magic can remake social codes is in offering us alternatives. Rituals, circle casting, coven meetings, personal practices, all of these tools can and are used by the witches I know to change their own reality, and in so doing change the reality of others. But even though all of this is great and groovy, I would be lying if i did not say that really what I want to be able to do is fly on a broom and hurl fire from my fingers.

Took the words right out of my SOUL

Perhaps this is because I grew up on Harry Potter and other fantasy novels and I have unrealistic expectations around magic. However the bond between pet and pet ‘owner’ (I dislike this term owner. but you know what I mean.) has always been a space where  ‘the magic’ has been tangible to me. Not only can we learn so much from our pets, but we can develop odd and uncanny ways of understanding them. Sure most dogs are creatures of habit with limited desires, but that does not make the bonds we have with them any less magical and profound.

As a kid, I had many pets, and often imagined that my dogs were my familiars. I would read the tales of witches who had magical familiars in the forms of cats, ravens, and geese, animals they would set off into the world to do their bidding, and then try to get my dogs to do things for me. It never worked.

But as a social tool for reworking your relationship to social norms the familiar to me functions as a representation of the animalistic, the natural, the raw and the wild as present within ourselves.  A symbol of the bridge between the human social and the wild natural that I meditate on often. The familiar as a concept is a way to externalize and in externalizing honor and try to understand, (be in relationship with) your wild desires and passions. For a few months I have been meditating on what my ‘familiar’ would be. I kept looking towards the animal world to find a creature I thought represented me. (probably a Sifika Lemur, Thank you my dear friend NEON ANIMAL for suggesting this) but after months of looking, it dawned on me, that evening on the M train that the singular concept that combines my human social wants; community, relationship, snuggling, security, love of the digital, and my wild natural side; sex, consumption, scents, smells, tastes and fluids, is a photo of my cock.

OH god Its just so cute and Faggoty

So now as a 28 year old in a world where technology is exploding around us, and divisions between the mundane and the magical are being deconstructed daily, I find my mind turned towards the powers my phone grants me and find within it lays a host of quasi-magical abilities. Instantaneous access to maps, communication, memory, my phone augments my reality so deeply that I can only truly understand it as magical. Without question my favorite magical element of my phone is that it is the digital home, (aka pokeball,) for the familiar I have always dreamed of, my dick.

BACK TO THE STORY:

Ok yeah, this is hardly me at my most eloquent, but I love that this man liked the nail polish I was wearing while holding my penis.

This particular incarnation of my familiar and I have been together for about 2 years (it really is a flattering picture, and I mean I love my dick in the flesh, but it looks real good in this picture). Yet why you may ask is my cock my familiar; a familiar who has perhaps become too familiar to too many men?

Because as I lay in bed in the wee hours, or sit at a cafe waiting for some friend to show, I send him on adventures like the witches of my young-adult fantasy novels did send their crows: to deliver messages, promises and spells to other creatures in far off parts of this magical land. He flies down digital pathways, given wings by my need to grapple with the human condition, by grappling with another and delivers the promise of magical union, sexual bliss, to strangers. He is a magic key, from him comes addresses to magical doors, portals to pleasure and ecstatic bliss. He casts spells for me; wanders the world and does my bidding for me; he seeks out prey and sings sirens calls, luring them into my erotic fantasies, he tells them of times we could have, and pleasure we could feel, the joy of bodies, strangers bodies, friends bodies, lovers bodies, pressed together, mingling sweat with promises, with cum.

My physical cock is of my flesh, it is me. The photo of my cock is an object an icon, here named familiar.  Though it is of me, it is the promise of a sexual dimension of me stripped of complexity and emotions and rendered into a purely sexual object, into the promise of an orgasm. The cock picture-object is very different then who I am, it is myself locked into a state of the wild erotic, it is hungry and devilish and desiring. It is glorious. In seeing ‘my hard cock’ as different from ‘myself’, I also open up space for multiple dimensions and parts of my own sexuality that include ‘my hard cock’, but also hold space for other forms of erotic interaction and exchange that often get lost or swept away in our dick in ass or mouth obsessed gay sex cultures. Forms of erotic interaction such as massage, snuggeling, role play, bdsm play, kissing, hugging, verbal sex play, mutual masturbation, and so on… My dick pic can be the raw, hard, hung version of myself, and I can be just authentically me. At times I am my familiar and yet sometimes, I just need a snuggle.

I have come to understand my dick pic as something that symbolizes what society wants from me. It wants me to be a ‘MAN’, and MEN are HARD.

But that’s so reductive, I am not my erect cock, nor should I be, and I should not try to act like it. But often I do. I feel a weird social compulsion, especially in gay space, to always be READY for sex. To always be flirting, to always be seeking it out.

The eternally hard cock is part of my psyche but it’s an element of me, rather than me. So much of me is flaccid, is weak, is supple, loves to bend and be mutable. Weakness is a strength. I am only now coming to understand how I can ask for help when I need it, or show weakness and not be ashamed. I feel that for years I tried to live up to these unobtainable expectations, sexually and culturally, and this personal move to see my dick pic as a familiar, even just in the last month, has actually helped me hold space for flaccidity. It helps me both honor my sexual and erotic impulses, while reminding myself to remain present and myself within those interactions. It’s like I recently went to an orgy, but when i showed up, what I really wanted was to chat and have a glass of wine and unwind with friends. Traditionally I think i would have felt incredibly bad about myself. About not getting hard the moment I walked in, in not being sexual enough, but then I remembered this was a community of men who have all seen photos of my hard familiar, and I could take my time. Be my fleshy, tired from the day me, rather than jumping right into THE SEX.

OMGAWDZZZZ if I cropped this differently you would be able to see my penis. SCANDAL. really what is so scandalous about a body thats naked. I love being naked. perhaps this is more a conversation for another day however.

I don’t have to be hard always, because my Dick Pic Familiar is. It is never anything other than a dick in a permanent state of arousal.The way I see it is the capitalist – patriarchal system has always desired and tried to make us into, the eternally hard cock, ready at a moments notice to fuck anything. Fuck, consume, fuck, consume, fuck, consume, CAPITALISM.

GIFS CAN CHANGE THE WERLD

Personally I love both of those things (the fucking and the consuming that is.) But I want to reclaim them from a capitalist dialogue, and use those terms, and perform those actions intentionally and with understanding. To position my dick pic as the object that is those things allows me  to be something else. What I am perhaps not sure, but I am beginning to question it.

My familiar also allows me to gloriously claim my desire to fuck in a new way, it is a step in a long journey towards honoring my own earth based sexuality — my desire to explore the orgasmic, my desire for new modalities of sexual exchange, new forms of touch. Sex is now a communion between me, my cock and  everything from my hand to the orifices of another.

My dick pic as familiar helps me interpret the act of digital cruising as Magical as well. As a ritualist act of giving myself and my sexuality over to the worship of the god/dess, of cycles of desiring and death, love and lust, things fleshy and infleshed and human. It makes Scruffing an almost spiritual practice where I honor the fact that I love sex, and I love ‘hunting’ for sex, I love my cock, and I’m not ashamed.

There is nothing wrong with my (or your) desire to penetrate and be penetrated (or whatever in whatever way you want) and to be TOTALLY ROCK HARD FOR HOURS, but I think the big old metaphorical straight white man who thinks with his cock all the time has fucked this world up enough and it’s time to change our relationship with our sex organs while still honoring them. (BECAUSE SEX IS TOTALLY SACRED EVEN WHEN IT’S WITH STRANGERS OR YOU KNOW LIKE EHHHH NOT SO GREAT…)  I have no idea if I’m doing it right. But I’ve got a dick, a dick pic, a phone and a whole lot of dreams. Seeing my dick pic as a construct I am in relationship with rather then an object, helps me to see other men, and their sexual images as something I am in relationship with as well rather than as objects. It helps me remind myself that though we are communicating with each other through an application designed to foster sexual connection, I am speaking with people who have dreams and fantasies and insecurities, and moments of flaccidity themselves.

Which brings me to where I am headed in the next installment, perhaps, an expanded conversation on the spells of capitalism, which I briefly touched on, and how capitalisms desires for us to see each other as objects rather than as people. How capitalism wants us to never actually have sex but to just have huge amounts of sexually inflected frustration, desire and dreams, for an unhappy and frustrated person is more likely to buy things. I’ll also keep talking about this Lion27 character. maybe… does it really matter if we had sex anyway? 

Unicorns and Faeries: The Scourge of humanity?

The picture that launched these thoughts! Shaft, obvi the photographer.

My old friend Shaft was in town and being that he is a unicorn, and that I used to be one with him, we obviously got our horns on together.  After a delightful day of catching up and talking shop, we went over to his lovely friends house in the FIDI and sat around making Unicorn horns. It was such a lovely way to connect with an old friend and welcome in the spirit of Samhain.

But this morning I awoke to an innocuous Facebook message in a thread of comments about a picture of us dressed as unicorns from the night before. “NOOOOOO shelton, not you too!!!! (crying image of a puppy) PS, if you have to be a stupid dumb-ass unicorn, you do look sorta super-cute, for a unicorn.” While i’m glad that i look cute, (obvi) I find this idea, that once would feel empowered to yell at some one else for their costume choices, to be a fundamental example of why I celebrate people like Shaft who have decided to claim their identity as other that human. Shaft I love you. I love that you are unashamedly a Unicorn. I think it’s both sexy and fun.

My friend who posted this response, was probably not expecting it to touch a raw nerve of mine, but it did. It got me thinking about all the negative response that Shaft received as comments from his Vice documentary, from death threats, to vague ‘he’s worse than a terrorist’ racist comments. To comments I get for being a faggot, to those comments anyone gets who falls outside of the expected boundaries of being ‘Human’ See my ‘ Facebook friend’ is not alone, my friend is one of thousands of people, whose response when they see something different, is to make fun of it and belittle it. While I welcome freedom of expression, am not looking for an apology, and I understand in a way what they were saying, it inspired me to ask, well if you hate me for being a unicorn, what’s so good about being human? What am I missing? I think probably, the answer is nothing. For if humanity was so great it would not have to police its boundaries so strongly. It would not have to make sure that those who transgressed it ’s boundaries were brought back into the folds of conformity. Well I’m sorry humanity, yelling at me for not being like you, does not make me want to be like you. 

Here is me being an Atlantic Blue Fin Tuna for a day, because why not.

All that we are doing is exploring our own psyches. I know that our freedom of expression must serve as a harsh reminder of all the ways you self-sabotage, deny, and occlude your truest expression of self. But join us rather than hate us. I want you to come play with us!

I’m sorry to all those who find it so easy to hate those who are different. It must be hard being you. You must be sad often. I too am often sad. But that is because the world is a cruel place. And yes their are many ways which I fail at being fully me, but at the end of the day, I do make a concerted effort to support myself. To love myself, to forgive myself. It’s cute. It’s Werk. It’s actually a lot of werk. Between that werk, and work, and you know trying to WERKKKK IT, I really don’t have the time to absent-mindedly hate others for being different. I mean it seems like a pretty obvious waste of resources and time.

One of the tricks, and it’s TOTALLY a trick that I have used in attempting to understand myself is to begin by just discarding humanity as a term I identify with. (I mean obvi, in a biological way i’m a human, and culturally too.) It’s a thought experiment I play with while biking around the city, or sitting on the subway. What would it mean to discard all those signifying terms from gender, nationality, race, ect… and just be what ever the fuck I felt like. I’m not doing this for you, I’m doing it for me. To heal my own wounds, to be more fully myself, to just have fun.

Me as a willow tree, the whomping willow tree in fact. Shot by Santiago Felipe at the culture whores CHAMBER OF SECRETS party, for Paper Mag http://www.papermag.com/2015/10/

I often play with this in a real way by trying to embody the traits that I have self selected as defining a ‘faerie’, or a ‘witch’, or a ‘tree’. I like to dress up as these things, and for the duration of that performance, or time I am in that outfit, discard my own humanity. YAY for liminal spaces of liberation, yay for different modalities of seeing yourself, YAY for questions without answers, yay for trial.

That said, I’m sorry for all the hate we attract for being different. I often wonder what about our disavowal of human as how we define upsets so many people on such a fundamental level? When I think of what defines ‘humanity’ it is a long list of modalities of oppression. Contemporary and historical conversations on queer rights, women’s rights, POC rights and environmental protection, leave me mortified. How we have as a collective of souls allowed war, capitalism, the patriarchy, religious intolerance and national pride to ruin and fuck not only our planet, but each other.  It seems what humans are exceptionally good at is fucking things up. Hurting each other.

What is so good about being human. What is it that we do well? What is it about our species that is worth saving? Oh sure perhaps it is our kindness and compassion, perhaps it is our capacity for love, or our desire to tell stories. (all things which I love about humans.) Yet I fear that even those traits are eradicated by our species deep and unfortunate inability to process our own bull shit internally. Instead we project, we yell, we belittle others, we even do such things as innocuously make fun of people for dressing up like unicorn’s on the night before Halloween. What is it that we do right? I’m not sure we do anything right.

My first Unicorn moment oh so many years ago.

We are like a plague. We are trapped in our history, we rarely make smart choices. We are driven by greed. (I’m including myself in this, I often fail and I too can be cruel and unjust.) I often experience this hate directed at me when people choose to go out of their way to let me know that they don’t approve of my choices. Firstly, let me say that’s on them. I’m actually rather pleased with my life, and the choices I have made, and I am happy to have you tell me why you think I’m a failure, ugly, weird, stupid, ect… I don’t expect you to be nice to me, because people are not particularly nice. But I hope that I can be your mirror. I hope in hating me, it makes you question why you hate. I hope our interactions ultimately lead you to question yourself. See, in my experience people who truly like themselves rarely go out of their way to insult others.

this outfit made BRO’s GAG. WERKKKKKK.

(Extraneous example: a few weeks ago I was walking on the streets and these BROS saw me and started pretending to vomit on themselves. I’m not sure they intended to make me laugh, but it was a pretty golden moment. I think the best part of the interaction was that when I laughed at them, because it was funny, they got super awkward. when I asked them what about my outfit they disliked, they got really uncomfortable. and then mumbled lots of stuff and looked sheepish. I mean watching to adults fo-vomit on themselves because of what I was wearing was totally a bucket list moment even if I was not aware of it till it happened.)

Anyway, really what I am getting at, is that costumes, and play, outfits, and performance, embodiment and channeling, unicorns and faeries, dress up and make believe are actually super powerful tools we can use to reshape our world. So much of humanity is shitty, but I really honestly believe we could wake up and live in a different world, a world much more peaceful and glorious, if we all stopped seeing ourselves inside the context of human history and started writing a new narrative. The old narratives are not working, they no longer serve us. Our greatest tool as human’s is language. So lets utilize it and see what happens. Let’s all for a day discard all old oppressions and modes of relating to each other that tell us that we can’t and should not like one another.  One to many wars, genocides, acts of enslavement have happened to humans at the hands of humans. Lets all just become mythical. For a moment for a day, witches, faeries, unicorns, fauns, nymphs, dryads, creatures of love, creatures varied and different who see the difference in others as something to learn from, to love, rather than something to hate. I want everyone to be a freak. It’s Halloween. Let’s don more then costumes tonight, let’s all become something new. 

Happy Halloween.

(these are rough thoughts written over a cup of coffee, I will inevitably return to them. I’d love your thoughts peoples, if you want to share them with me so i can craft a more articulate piece in the weeks ahead about this theme, but I just woke up wanting to share. Really xx)

‘Expressions of Self Love’, An excerpt from a larger piece I am working on, called ‘My life’: Sauna

The flyer for their AWESOME show

Once Upon a Dixon place I read this story at Dust Tea Shoulders and World Famous *Bob*’s Queer Campfire Story. They will be hosting another Campfire in November and it is totally worth checking out.

Below is my story. It is a story of drama and intrigue and umm drama… sort of.. It’s about falling in love in a bathhouse really…

Prologue

When I think about the campfire, I think back to my summer camp times at Flying Moose Lodge, lovingly referred to by its campers as F.M.L. It’s there that I learned to be a faggot, camping in the woods of rural Maine with 50 other boys, no showers, no running wanter, no electricity, only tents and stars and bonfires. We often told stories late into the night, while we drank hot coco and ate burned blueberry pie right out of the dutch oven. The stories we told were of conquest and terror, of creepy happenings and the campers who a mythical number of years ago were sucked into a hydro – electric dam and spit out in pieces. I don’t want to tell those stories tonight, I want to talk of when I first fell in Love… Perhaps in its own way its a horror story, for love, often is, a tad bit horrific. Here is my story, I am titling it;

‘Expressions of Self Love’, An excerpt from a larger piece I am working on, called ‘My life’.

This specific entry is called ‘Sauna.’

An example of a Chariots interior.

We met in a Sauna in East London. Which sounds classy I know, but I promise you, it was not. It was the Shoreditch Charriots. For those of you who have never been, Chariots is a rather successful brand of Gay Bathhouses that dominate the U.K.’s Capital. They specialize in a faux-Grecian theme, you know painted ivy and gladiatorial porno-wresteling mosaics on the wall. What I remember most was the smells, a delightful mixture of pre-cum and poppers mixed with chemical cleaning solvents and that light metallic scent, which I have come to recognize as desperation. it’s the scent that lingers around burnt out lights, and those duct tape patches holding  red pleather mats together.

Here is Chariots almost burning down… Awkward.

I had just turned  20 when this story takes place. I had recently lost 50 pounds, grown out my hair and begun dancing regularly. When I looked in the mirror I was a stranger to myself. My body had become alien and yet delightful, and I was deeply enjoying exploring it with the help of others. That said I still had a lot of hang ups about sex.

I looked a lot like this at the time.

It had a lot to do with how I viewed myself. Like mainly everything. I was deeply uncomfortable in my own skin. It’s not just because of the aforementioned fluctuating weight. I think it had everything to do with being uncomfortable with self pleasure. I’d jerk off nightly into a tissue because i never wanted to see the cum. I thought it was messy, and yes, a bit shameful. My gay cum was a symbol of my continued failure at achieving heterosexuality. I was this really faggoty, glitter wearing, queen by day, and a huge internalized homophobe in the sheets. My sex was timid, and vanilla and never beautiful.

However I had begun to work through this issue of self love, of in all places, the Chariots Steam room. The first time I went to a bathhouse at all i sat quaking in a toilet stall for almost an hour, listening to the sounds of men shit in the cubical next to me, Petrified, that they were going to sense my presence, kick down the door and drag me out and laugh at me. Shame me for my body and let me know that I would never be like them.  It was only when i got to the steam room, dim lights, misty air, hidden hands, that i exhaled, relaxed and allowed myself to be present.

I first noticed a big change in myself, the third or forth time I visited the chariots steam room. I was blown to competition, and yet still kept sucking some other man’s dick. It was in that orgy room that I began to be okay with orgasming. to still feel sexy, to still love my body in the moments after climax. I know that sounds simple, but for me it was really hard.

It was there I learned I could walk into a room filled with men, who all had that hungry look in their eyes, that desire to touch taste and lick one another, and simply by the virtue of not being terribly British about it, but just taking off my towel and standing in the center of a room pulling my own nipples and moaning in that fake it till you make it sort of modality, I could convince any number of men to join me and rub my body.

It looked nothing like this… lets pretend it did.

It was heaven. I became addicted. it was a delightful feedback loop, they wanted me, I wanted them, we wanted eachother, BAM it was sex therapy at 11 pounds a session. I would show up in that Sauna room on extended lunch breaks, on weekends, when I was meant to be at a friends art show, and I would indulge in the caresses of a hundred unknown men. I began to feel sexy. Actually sexy, for the first time in my life. Yet the visit this Tuesday was different. When I paid my 11 pounds, and walked into that locker room I did so with the predetermined decision that I was going to fall in love.

Fall in love you say? yes! LOVE OH LOVE. the most noble of pursuits. The subject of good poetry and prose! How I wanted it. I had up until then, never really been in love. Not even with myself if I am honest to you. But on that Tuesday, from the moment I had awoken, I felt that I was fated to fall in love in the steam room. I was ready! Ok I was hardly ready, Love is Scary and Messy, but I told myself my future love was going to see all the fear in me, and be ok with it. He was going to be a guide to me. My gateway drug to love. This handsome hunky gay bearded self possessed daddy billionaire, just looking for an awkward, not a boy not yet really a man, expat with half a degree in film theory.  Yes I was going to fall in Love that day I just KNEW IT.

At first, when I got there it felt like any other time I had been to the bath house. I slipped on a pool of cum, some one had definitely shat all over the dark room if the smell was anything to go by, and so far the only person who had displayed any interest in me was quite clearly crazed. Not crazed like askance from the normal, or crazy like he’s probably a really good poet, just, you know, your average crazy.

But un-daunted I found my way to the sauna steam room, found a nice place on the second tier of the bench, up between the muscle daddy, (Likely candidate) and the twink (Not so much, but you never know.), and I relaxed into the orgy I knew was coming. I breathed in, breathed out, let my towel slide from my body and offered myself up as sexual tribute.

I mean he just looks like the kind of man who would want to spend his time with a semi-self aware 20 year old, right?

Often, to make the experience of a largely anonymous orgy more enjoyable, I close my eyes. I like the feeling of being pleasured by faceless individuals. I l love not knowing who is touching me of feeling greedy hands grab me as if only my body can satiate their hunger.

At some point I had slid into the arms of the muscle daddy, woof, and found myself contorted around his body, my tongue licking its way across his pecs and up to his shoulder, while his calloused fingers pulled at my flesh. As he slid  his finger into me, wet off my own sweat, I discovered his arm. Not the muscle daddies arm, his arm, my lovers arm. My eyes were still closed, the sounds of moaning all around me, I kissed it once and it felt like home. I kissed again. deeper. More intense. with ferocity and hunger. I moaned. Some where he moaned. WE MOANED. It felt as if we were falling into each other. And if by magic while I was kissing his arm, he was kissing, and licking and biting mine; it felt so divinely circular. Me biting him, him biting me, it was… completion.

In a sea of sweaty men, in an orgy largely of my own devising I opened my eyes to gaze upon my love. I traced the contours of his flesh up his arm, and to his face, where with horrifying actuality, I realized I was in fact making out with my own arm. My love, the man I had gone to meet in the steam room, the man I had felt all day fated to find, was in fact myself.

Orgies are not normally where one looks for spiritual and personal development, but sometimes its where you find it. 

Come on roll that d20

A continuation of the story I began early this week about breakups and DnD. It has been therapeutic to write, and share, and through that process to learn to relax and let stories have their space, to give them the freedom to be that delicious mingling of truth and fact, fiction and desire. To give words breath.

http://geeksout.org/blogs/sheltonplindsay/level-ups-break-ups-and-2-music-comprehension-rolls-part-2

And so he found himself single once more… and playing lots of DnD

(My tears were totally this moody and well staged)

Several months ago my partner and I broke up. It was sort of terrible for me, but necessary for both of us I imagine. Either way, Holy goddess how I have cried, and to those who have been standins for tissues and have let me weep on their bodies and cover their sweaters in that fine filmy mixture of salt tears and snot, thank you. Especially my cousin Sam who has been an AMAZING help and voice through this time. ANYWAY, its been enough time that i’ve become sort of okish about talking about it. As part of the process of reclaiming my own identity, and not just crying all the time I have taken to writing about my FEELINGS. Most of which i will never share with any one, as its the stuff bad poetry is made of. You know, tear stained pages, bleeding black ink around strong nouns and verbs found in Taylor Swift songs.

BUT i did write about how break ups are like level ups, because I’m geeky, and I’ll totally share that with you.

http://geeksout.org/blogs/sheltonplindsay/level-ups-break-ups-and-2-music-comprehension-rolls

love as the earth moves round the sun

Faggots Making Out Places

So here we are hurtling through space on a rock that spinning around an explosion that’s twirling like the fringe on a super faggoty tassel dress on the edge of some galactic 1920’s flapper as we venture ever on in some directionless infinite space with out much of a point but with a whole lot of feelings, and its our anniversary.

EARTH SCIENCE

I don’t know what any of the dots stand for, i just like this image because it looks very MATHY. and also because galaxies look like a great milky foam on a latte.

Its Nick and my anniversary, of the day we met, which is also the day we started dating, which seems like yesterday and about 17 years ago, (Because time is super relative, and Nick and I being both New Yorkers talk a lot and fast and being both over fascinated with how humans as humans function have spent hours in some weird state of seemingly endless meta-reflection on our individual ‘me-ness’ and out collective ‘us-ness’ , WHICH I LOVE, but does make it feel at times like I’ve known him for ever) but was in fact just 730 days ago.

We met at Burning Man and time stood still. (to set the scene, I was pole dancing on a platform as a mermaid in a blue sequined gown and a ferocious pink wig covered in an endless parade of flowers woven into my hair and big old leather boots. Also perhaps its time to be honest, I was trying to pole dance. I’m not very good at it at the best of times, but the pole was hardly vertical, and my dress was really long. I mean I’m sure I looked FIERCE, but its also possible I looked like a carp struggling to breath out in the open air, THRASHING. He was dressed like some sort of Ninja auto mechanic, there are no pictures.)

MERMAN ME

But really, time, it actually slowed down. It was slow time, beautiful time, time you can think in, time that functions on a scale different to the human, a time more cellular. I’m sure we have all had the experience. Normally I see life like this big crazy orgy of death and desire and Handle esq dramatic classical music, and its all mood lighting (And lightning) and raw emotions, and giants eating the flesh of mere mortals, and utter chaos and blood. Fields of endless humanity striped of all pretension till its revels in it animalistic, natural, orgiastic, fecund, brilliance. It’s primal and sweaty and layered in complexity.

And because I’m a faggot its also filled with lots and lots of glitter and ponies and you know Hieronymus Bosch Garden of Earthly Delights realness and Raqib Shaw inspired faggotry and soaring diva arias and pink lipstick. And there are exquisite waterfalls of diamonds and fields with grass so green you recognize them as fluid fields of emeralds. All furniture is antique, all cups are goblets all goblets are ornate, and there is no difference between this space and any other.

Raqib Shaw is a genius. Look him up, Pictures hardly do it justice.

Another one of my favorite Shaw pieces

Everything is piled against each other till reality becomes so deep in the endless layered complexity, which is friendship and love and dreams, and war and suffering, and longing that it all becomes a flat two dimension painted experience that is simultaneously Zeus being eaten by Saturn and the arrival of Venus.

Goya…. WERK

#Iwokeuptolifelikethis #flawless

And I’m sure I’m not alone in this vision, I know Nick for instance has seen reality this way before, and perhaps that’s why I love him.

But in that moment, everything stopped. Amidst the chaos of reality, there was a breath of silence. True silence. Not the silence which is the absence of noise, that silence is basic, that silence is a shadow of true silence. It’s the silence in which the fates live, Clotho, Atropos, Lachesis, that was your domain. Everything was real in that moment, no chaos, no glitter, just the raw substance of life.

I don’t remember looking at him as he asked me if I wanted to leave that dance platform, and my well worked poll and those Bootie jams and go with him on an adventure. I remember seeing through him. To the space far distant which existed in an alternative future of my own. It was there, in that moment that I took my own fated threads into my own hands and wove but one stitch on the tapestry of my life.

This mashup is like soooo overly sentimental and I LOVE IT.

I very much wanted to say no. No was safe, and no was familiar, and no was no to all the things I did not feel I could yet say yes to. No was no to my faggotry, to self-work to love. No was living a pre-scripted life where I had already resigned myself to being a fat old gay man, in ruby sun glasses and Hawaiian shirts drink Cosmos, but the side of motel pools in Lodi, California. Which lets be honest sounds great. I have gray hair, and look like Glenn Close playing Baby Jane. I say loudly and often that I once was SOMEBODY. I spill most things I drink on myself, which is lucky as I’m always about to erupt into flames as the cigarettes I’m always trying to smoke, have a habit of falling onto the expanse of my stomach and smoldering away, unnoticed. Everything I own has burn marks and pits stains. All of this of course is redeemed when they make an E Hollywood true story about me and then a biopic and I spent the last several decades of my life transformed into some sophisticated slob.

Anyway…

The space beyond him was an epic sea of lights, and color, and other adventures, of art and wisdom I do not yet know, or may never. It was a choice towards a certain kind of life to say yes. I had so much more then two options then, I had a world of possibilities.

It was slowed time, stopped time, real time. It was glorious. I lived a thousand lives in that moment, I have seen a hundred me’s. Can one fall in love in a moment, in a look, in a word? No. did I? Yes. It was not a moment, it was a lifetime a spiritual breath. I had all the time to consider, and all we had done was kiss once, and Blah blah blah, I know mushy. But I loved him then, and I love him now.

Which is not to say that is been super easy. Relationships are hard. And I’m challenged by ours daily. Not like Hercules 12 labors challenged, but living with some one, and co-creating a life together can be totally exhausting. I’m also often overly dramatic and Nick can be absurd and we often both fail at being the best versions of ourselves. but that’s not a deal breaker, that’s the reality of life.

My makeup Is TERRIBLE, but Trouble looks lovely

Since all people BE CRAZY, (obviously including myself) its rather miraculous to find any one at all to share ones life with. And it’s hard. Gay world is hard when it comes to love. And I guess I feel like sharing in case some of my journey which was hard and done largely in silence, can inspire you and save you some time. I mean there are a million great self-helpish books out there on this topic, like the VELVET RAGE, but i think sharing personal journeys can also help. Also this day is an occasion to socially celebrate our love, and our love has been supported so much by various communities and friends, that its hardly a celebration for two, but a deep thank you to everyone who has helped us grow together, so the least I feel I can do is be honest about how hard love is to find even within the self, let alone with another. So here is the spark notes version of mine.

Anyway I’m sure the world of straight love is hard too. I’m not saying we, as the ‘gays’ have it the hardest, I’m just saying there are some unique problems and process we work through as gay men, that are HARD to talk about. Not least because we self medicate with clubbing and anonymous sex and are so tired of years of repression and self hate, that some times we just like to explode into our own gayness and not have to be involved in more self reflection.

All we want is some good old fun and validation and lots of exceptionally hot fucking. I love all of these things and have indulged in them heavily, I’m not passing judgment on anyone, I’m just talking about my own experience, and in that I used sex and clubbing to avoid self reflection for a long time. But I think this process of self exploration which was kicked started in my psyche in a big way as I worked through feelings of same-sex desire, and then I abandoned for several years of hedonism, and am now picking up again in an intentional way is a gift connected to my gayness. I’m so glad I taught myself the tools of self-reflection and deeply interrogate my relationship to desire as I learned in silence and often suffering that I was gay. It was MESSY AS FUCK, and scary but GODDESS when I am down on my self or tired I just remember how proud I am of myself for coming out and discovery my own faggotry and its like ‘GURL you got this.’  and all those years of hedonism taught me how HAMAZING gay gay gay gay gay sex and dancing, and ki-ki-ing can be and that was totally necessary and I still LOVE IT.

US working We Got This Realness, Thanks Brett for this nip slip realness (http://brettlindellphotography.com/)

So for me, to really love Nick, to even be ready to meet some one like Nick and fall in love, took a huge amount of work. The first thing I had to learn was to love myself. ESPECIALLY my gay self. this involved processing large amounts of socially induced internalized homophobia in order to be able to truly embrace my gay love and not reject people who expressed desire for me. Which seems basic but I had a really hard time with it. I had a hard time letting people love me as I always felt slightly flawed for being gay. So I sought solace in fantastic female companions whose love I could accept as it was never sexual. AND i’m so glad I did that, I have had so many fantastic female identified teachers in my life, and thank you for your support and guidance, from my mother to my dearest friends, you taught me how to love all aspects of me. You all saved me! thank you! and you all taught me something our Lady Ru says “If you can’t love yourself, how in the hell are you going to love somebody else.”

C3PO got a MAKEOVER

Or at least I did/am learning to love my gayness. Which has been its own lengthy journey and I had to learn how to do that, before I could even begin thinking about loving another. Then I had to learn in my own way what it even means to love, for I both lacked good gay-love social role models, and I feel I lost so many potential teachers to the AIDS epidemic that their was a break in the transmission of knowledge and culture. Furthermore because of the Epidemic the act of love comes with a huge amount of social and personal baggage not to mention fears and phobias. There is a lot more to unpack here and I don’t want to make it sound simplistic but that conversation is for another time.

(And I don’t mean that I had not ever been exposed to love, but we spend so long seeing social depictions of love that are heteronormative that I fear that many of us feel distanced from love as we recognize that love, the most pervasively marketed and expressed form of love as something we find antithetical to our natures and desire. It takes a while to process this. Or again it did for me. And when sex which is an expression of love has become associated with death, love and desire hardly seem promising, them seem like the gateway to annihilation.)

I’d like to say I have done all this. And I’m totally sorted, but obviously that’s a massive lie. And it can make loving some one else hard, because I’m fragile, and broken and afraid, and incredibly strong, and self willed and in the words of Beyonce ‘I’m a grown woman I’ll do what ever I want.” Which I do. Often. But that in itself is messy. Life is messy. LIKE REALLY MESSY. And love is not some Hollywood romance, real love is self-annihilating and explosive, and it churns up your being and makes you look at all of yourself, hunting for that spot in you that is unlovable. Real love is not the reason you delete scruff or grindr. Real love is something that encourages you to explore everything, even sex with others, even intimacy with others, even love with others. Real love is not about promises to limit your experience, real love is about encouraging each other to grow. AND IT’S SO HARD. And I’m often really bad at it. But I try.

The day before I met Nick at Burning Man I sat with a shaman for 3 hours in the baking sun, and we talked through all of this. and I cried. OH did I cry, I cried with the ferocity of a man heaving up from the depths of his soul the poison of a life time. something fleshy and made of stone, covered in bile and oozing. It was rancid and real, and made up from the fibers of my fear. Just naming it that first time, just explore my fear, and my wounded shadow, made me so ready to even accept the thought of love. and of course there is tones of that bile still deep inside me, but I am lucky, unbelievably lucky. I have found this mystical amazing faggot companion who loves all the broken bits, (ok not all of them, but he makes a good show of taking the sharp edges along with the love) and helps me explore myself as I hope I help him. My journey towards loving Nick started with that Shaman that day when I accepted love in a visceral way. I believe that it was his guidance that allowed me to see the thought of love, the promise of love, in that moment out of time on that dance platform. (I FUCKING LOVE BURNING MAN SO MUCH ITS SUCH A GREAT PLACE TO GO TO LEARN ABOUT THE SOUL.)

But as I was saying when I started this here we are, floating in space, on a rock, in love. And its an adventure. It’s such an adventure. What are we marking with this anniversary, a year more of love, or the passing of the earth around the sun to the approximate place where we met before, (even thought that’s hardly true as everything is ever in motion and one can never return to space previously occupied.) Anniversaries are such human fleshy things, such absurd sentimental things, and I’m not totally sure why I am bending to this social pressure to make this day extra special and loving, (Like hello capitalism trying to squeeze money from my pockets in a tribute of love.) but im rather happy to do so, as I love to love you Nick and I love telling the world about it, no matter where in the heavens the earth hangs. Thank you for dancing with me.  and for making these super cute eyes at me a lot when you’re feeling super lovely, they MELT MY HEART. And for loving me when I burst into tears as we watch Legend Of Korra. (Which happens slightly too often, but Children’s TV. can be SOOOO DRAMATIC) And for letting me always be the little spoon, Like all the time.

This is the day we met. and im all like SWOON

So I took 4 disposable cameras worth of film over the last 12 months, I got them on our anniversary last year and I’ve taken random photos, of places we have been and moments we have had together, and here are a few of my favorites.

Nick and I being adorable on our last anniversary at the BURN

I just love to kiss him.

#Ladiesinred

LOVE EYES see these are the love eyes I was talking about!

So happy anniversary Mr. Trouble. I love you, thank you. I’m really glad to share our love, which we do with the world every day walking around holding hands, and hugging for longer then is necessary when we say good bye, (I’m a hugging addict) and occasionally wearing matching-ish faggoty outfits by mistake. I love you.

Big Old American Realness

It has recently come to my attention that America is L A R G E. To most others this statement of fact is probably rather obvious, but to myself, it has come as quite a shock. I believe this is because I’ve lived on a tiny island for a rather long time now. Born to a land as large as the sea, space always seemed excessively large to me, but now, even the sky seems further away. To rectify this I turn to BRILLIANT MAPS: (The rivers of America: discover more amazing maps here: http://twistedsifter.com/2013/08/maps-that-will-help-you-make-sense-of-the-world/ )

ANYWAY, I recently wrote about this for these people, check it out.

http://centmagazine.co.uk/xxl-america/9632

FAGGY Dissertation celebration

It’s come to my attention that (I love toeaaast) I never shared my dissertation with anyone. MAINLY, because the idea of doing so scares me hugely. It’s an odd work. Yes it represents several months of study but it also has huge flaws, entire sections that need to be greatly re-edited. Spelling mistakes abound (I really can’t spell)  blah blah blah. But I am ALSO rather proud of it as a singular work. Its the longest continuous thing I have ever written and for the most part I believe that it represents part of my own intellectual heritage. Most of my dissertation was an attempt to some how transmute my fear of being someone forever outside of community, into staking a claim to community. SO i’ve decided to share it in segments. Mainly for me, so I know that my dissertation like a strange lost child is wandering around somewhere, dancing.

PLUS I HAD A BLAST WRITING IT. Giving myself the time to interrogate my own homosexuality, or rather my glittery absurd gay-ness, and to write about it within the context of something that is special and unique and deserves to be explored has empowered me. everyone should write a dissertation about something they hold dear, its cathartic and  revelatory. So here is the preamble, and if I can in the days following I plan to share the rest of it. PLUS it seems like a good way to kick start my writing in 2014.

Like a Prayer: Intimations of the Religious in Gay Culture

For me, you see, one of the defining aspects of church ritual is that you know your fellow celebrants and they know you. So, yes, bar culture and drag culture can be very like going to church. Absolutely. Going to see Regina Fong at the Black Cap, or going to see Lily Savage at the Vauxhall tavern back in the early ‘80s, that was like going to church – we were the congregation and she was the celebrant. Absolutely. Yes, absolutely, I would say. Especially in Regina’s case; there was an order of service, certain specified hymns (show tunes), of which the congregation knew all the words, and a kind of final celebratory, transfigurative ritual, involving a final punch line. Yes, definitely, when Regina Fong and the congregation at the Black Cap all screamed, “jungle red!” In unison at the end of the night, she might as well have been saying, “Go in peace and serve The Lord.” You had to be there. Believe me, it was that good. ~ Neil Bartlett[1] 

Forward

Her Imperial Highness, The Grand Duchess, last of the Romanoff’s, rumored member of The Disappointer Sisters, Regina Fong died just over ten years ago. Yet still, she lives on: thanks to YouTube users like sjmlondon, who recorded her performance at the Black Cap pub in Camden in December 1992, you can still find Regina Fong online, commanding the stage. Through a shaky hand-held camera I watch her stride onto the stage, resplendent in her trade mark red wig, everything jumping in and out of focus, and I find that – rather than sitting on my sofa in east London – I am there, a few drinks in, being jostled about by throngs of gay men. During the video clip, as Regina performs one of her classic numbers, “The Typewriter Song” I start to understand what Bartlett was saying; this is not just a performance but a ritual. As the song begins the screen is filled with outstretched hands, desperate to touch Regina Fong, caress her, feel the hem of her skirt and be blessed by her. In truth they were simply performing alongside her, mimicking her every movement. Like her they were miming typing in the air, then slamming back their ethereal typewriter’s arm when the music queued them to. I am not familiar with this particular service; I do not know the hymns she sings, I am not a regular in her congregation. But watching her stride up and down that stage, the guide, the priestess, in this camp tranfigurative ritual, I recognize the faith. It is the homosecular; that imbircation between the religious and the secular as manifest within homosexual space.

[2]

I first experienced a moment like this several years ago. It must have been near midnight on a Saturday and Dickie Beau had taken to the stage of South London’s infamous Royal Vauxhall Tavern (RVT). Dressed in blood-red lace with scarlet pigtails and haunting makeup, he stood before us. When the music began, a haunting mixture of Britney Spears’ “Circus” and “Some Where Over the Rainbow”, I understood that this performance was going to be more than just an average Judy Garland impersonation. Dickie Beau that night was not impersonating Judy, he was performing Judy as an icon. Using audio recording from the Judy Garland speech tapes[3], mixed with a personally designed soundscape, the entire performance was transfixing and brought the dancing, chatting, flirting, patrons of the RVT to a halt. Beau’s performance was so immense, so hauntingly personal that any notion of a world beyond this stage was eclipsed. Time, space, communication, language, expectation, gender, sex, sexuality, intimacy were all unwound; this was not just a performance it was an invocation, it was liminality made physical.

[4]

As the piece rose towards its dramatic close, Judy/Beau turned to drink, knocking back shots, which in true camp style were filled with glitter.  Then, with a bang, she dramatically overdosed on stage. A strange hush filled the air before the patrons erupted into riotous applause. It was a sacred moment a religious moment. I found myself crying. Crying because that night, in that bar, I was connected to my gay brothers. I was connected back through a history of culture and love to the bar—The Stonewall, where riots broke out and gay liberation was born so many moons ago[5]— and beyond, to far distant pasts, to unnamed bars and forgotten lovers. There was such a history in his performance, such language in his gesture that I saw incalculable grief and pain, fear and love, always love, unfolding before me. Dickie Beau had become a conduit through which a gay and ephemeral past was born in front of me. I knew the congregation there that night, I knew those hymns, and I knew that church. When the lights came up, and the applause died down, I not only felt blessed, I felt excited. Having been spiritually transported by Beau’s show, none of us there in the RVT ever truly returned to the normal world. We sailed outward into the unknown, a collective of bodies floating in sacred space.

---

[1]Neil Bartlett “Plunge Into Your Shame” Gay Shame ed. David Halperin 348

[2] Regina Fong leading “The Type Writer Song” at the Black Cap in 1992. Smjlondon, “Advanced Typewriter –Wizard of Oz” (Aug 9^th 2008) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StrpxT2sGy4 (Aug 9^th)

[3] Where Mrs. Garland sat in a room and spoke a mixture of truly haunting personal anecdotes,

[4] Dickie Beau, as Judy, beginning to indulge in drink: Reavis Eitel ‘“I’ve been the one whose had to live with me” Judy Garland’ (Oct 24^th, 2008) (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ifd64CCdfuQ (Aug 9^th)

[5] On the day after Judy Garland’s death no less. Don’t underestimate the power of the diva and their drag counterparts.

Fur coat made entirely from male chest hair

i already wear this daily.

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