'new' survivors

This weekend, a couple of amazing women (thank you Kiki and Elicia!) organized a Peace March and Rally in Richmond, CA, to raise our voices and gather our energies in support of the high school student who was recently raped by a mob of young men -- and, too, to speak out against all sexual violences: against all sexualized violence, against all the messages we teach our children equating masculinity with violence, femininity with passivity, against rape as a weapon of war, against sexualized violence as a part of our every day lives.

After missing the first part of the rally, Fresh! and I got to ride alongside the march for a minute, honking, making a whole lotta noise -- and we were met with the voices and shouts of the marchers! Then he dropped me off and I jogged to catch up with the small march, raised my voice -- it felt good to shout, and I had to cough a couple of times after being so loud: it seems my voice box has grown unaccustomed to loud chanting -- and that's one reason I understood it was good that I was there.

It's been several years, it seems, since I participated in this sort of anti-sexual violence/pro-peace-for-all rally. It's been several years since I walked through quiet neighborhoods and shouted: No Rape! No Rape! Was the last time in Maine? How could that be?

It's not that I haven't gathered, haven't witnessed and participated. The last rally in Richmond, last year, for another gang-rape survivor, was a mostly silent candle-lit vigil. That sort of gathering carries its own weight -- all of our stories, all of our friends' and families' stories, candlit and hungry, sitting just inside our mouths, held and honored and shared in that big big quiet.

I became aware, during the public rage that followed reports of this assault, messages and articles and furious notes I read and listened to online and from friends, of my presence in the aftermath. It's where I live and work: in the aftermath of sexual violence. the workshops I facilitate, the writing I do, it's about the after-story -- what comes next. All the words I use are prefaced with "re-": reclaim, restitution, resurrect. Doing over. Taking back. I don't live anymore in the place of before. Because I can't. My own body is an aftermath.

And so it was that I felt, too, on this Saturday, that our gathering was kind of the saddest sort of welcoming committee for this young woman. She is one of us now. She has a new name: survivor. Victim. The debates bat those words back and forth, but the fact is that she wears them now. Like we do. She has been violently delivered to our side of the battle ground. And we are standing up to show her she is among our kind now; we put our hands around her and we tend her wounds. These wounds are of her now. She lives in and with them. As we do, too.

I don't want this for her. I don't want this for her family or friends. I don't want this for any of us. I want other options. I don't want any more rallies of survivors to have to gather at the gates of the next rape, the next rape, the one happening right now. Right now. Right now. Right now. Right now. I want us to be able to disperse these energies, move on to other work -- raise our voices in praise of love, not in rage and sorrow.

I raged on Saturday, was grateful for all those gathered, and on Sunday I cried. I felt, again, the big, high vision of the hawk that flew over our gathering toward its end: from up high, I can see that this change won't manifest in my lifetime. I won't live to see it. But if I don't continue to hold on to the hope, hold hands open to the possibility that we as humans can learn to relate to and with one another through something besides the veil of violence and rage, then I close one more light shining the way -- does that make sense?

I don't see how we can make the changes we want to make. I don't see how we can get there, when sexualized violence is an ever-present option for men, for women, for anyone in power over any other one. I can't see it. I can't.

But -- here's the but: I stand together with a group of folks who might otherwise pass one another on the street in judgment, we raise our voices too loud, just loud enough for a Saturday morning neighborhood, we listen to one another's words and possibilities, we hear young men and women stating new ways, and I hold my hands open to the change one more time. I let my heart imagine it. I listen to men hold men accountable. I listen to women holding one another accountable. We are accountable to one another or there's nothing left.

If we don't keep working -- which means imagining, which means speaking the possible -- saying, yes, this can change. We can change -- there's nothing for the next generations carrying the torch, lighting the way. Right?

I don't want to be in one more 'welcoming' committee, bringing blankets and hotdish and tea and notebooks and pens and oranges and candles to the newly fallen -- and still, yes, that's where my work is right now.

How do we reframe (there it is again: re: frame) this -- life? This human-ness?

Does this make sense? Tell me what you think --

'indelible erotic loss'

A man at the Indy Arts Expo this weekend stopped at Fresh!'s table (we were there to promote Affirmative Acts Coaching!), and this man and I talked a little bit about the writing workshops. I said I did a little bit of blogging, about sexuality, about sexual trauma, about writing as a transformative practice -- he was very interested in what sorts of sex blogging I did, said, "I'm trying to figure out what about sex you write about."

Here is what I want to have said: I write about sex in the aftermath of sexual trauma, I write about the scarred desire that remains. I write about that crystalline brilliance and shame. I write about indelible erotic loss, the way it fills our hands sometimes at the same time we are touching someone... I write about the madness of that split, the surrender and joy of it, too. I may not be what you'd expect of a 'sex' blogger.

'under a genderqueering microscope'

The more comfortable I get with my girlhood, after seriously striving to embody masculinity for almost a decade, the less able I am to describe it -- girlhood -- with any kind of precision: Well, a girl's a female-bodied person, unless she's male-bodied, and she likes dresses and pink unless she hates them and prefers skinned knees and tree climbing or none of the above or all. Well, it's clear, isn't it, that the girl's the softer one, right? Except I've stroked some pretty soft boys -- and met girls rocked hard like stone and the girls are the ones who cry right except when they don't and the boys do and I'm done with layering on description and definition: femininity likes frills and adornment and paint and frivolity up to and until and unless and and it digs its unpainted nails into thick rocky soil or, yes, knows perfectly well how to turn a phrase between a girl's or a boi's legs and sings its songs with abandon until and unless it remains silent.

There's no sure thing about femininity and masculinity for me anymore -- not about either except in the know-it-when-i-see-it sorts of ways and even that is all up for interpretation and assumption, those kinds of grabs. The things that say boys are strong and girls get carried have never seen me (or you, or him, or hir) carry a box of books wearing four-inch heels and who cares if its girl or not except

I do. I thicken into the femininity my stepfather wrought for me, the tough bitch smart broad high femme ball buster prima donna that he was always just the right man for: it's that last part, of course, that leaves me nauseous, that wrote me into boyhood, into all the masculinity I'd always already carried, all my life -- they just called it tomboy but I took it out of my back pocket, fluffed it out, slicked it on and called that leather jacket and jeans and boots and shorn shorn head strong and safe

girlhood was the stuff that smeared his palms and yes, greased his chin, and I wanted to get myself far away from the staining thing that I had been. I drove a straight sharp line down between butch and femme, masculine and feminine, girl and boy and always I meant to bend myself toward the unlayerable side, unbreakable side, unbroad side, ungirl side. 'Cause boy is always and only not girl, right? We can say that at least for sure,

right?

Not in the world I come from, the dancers I live within, who question every frilly tail-marker under a genderqueering microscope. Some boys will be boys and girls will be women but other girls stripe their butts with Marilyn Monroe panties and dance on the stage with barbells in each hand and some boys like to bend at the waist when they sob or lay open to the receiving they were never supposed to want and all the lists of what's feminine and what's masculine just ends up being make believe or stereotype for me now, jogging my memory around what the folks outside the Bay Area Bubble say is good for gooses and ganders. It's longing for play I frill into, glitter that doesn't stain the eye and a kind of strong-fisted handshake that makes a grown butch do a double take.

We make our own lists every day anyway, stripped around society's damage, and when we come back home now and again, the bois will be girls will be femmes will be right

This is what my story contains

(A write from last night's workshop -- it's not edited, it's still raw and heart-beaty. And, too, here's a general warning that this piece contains some difficult and graphic material. Be easy with yourselves if you read on.)

This is what my story contains: this wreckage that is all of our wreckage, the fragmentary remembering that is never more than anyone else's remembering but feels like less, necessarily, because of the shroud trauma and loss cast over every indecent obelisk of that reckoning: an ornate crimson tinting, veiling the sharp delineated carve and curvature of breath

the way trauma is constantly whispering in my inside ear, asking Really? Are you sure? Are you sure? Are you sure? Are you sure? like static, that haze freezing the smooth flow of my pen as soon as I drop my hand to the page and begin to write -- static, the way a radio tuning goes cloudy sometimes once you remove the antenna your body provides when you pull your hand away and expect the music to keep on flowing smoothly on its own

this metaphor could extend indefinitely, remix with others, entwine, commingle, shadow, stave off -- but what's there is this girl holding a stepfather's balls in her one hand while his tiny, ostensibly purposefully foreshortened cock (he told her and the rest of them that he had learned an ancient Taoist technique of pulling the base of one's penis into the body so as to -- what? -- keep it warm? avoid hurting someone?) shoves rocks pushes in and out of her mouth. The clouds shroud my shoulders as I write the way her mouth clouded, too, eventually, filmy and white, and this was the livingroom couch and she was as worried as he was of getting caught -- getting caught -- by their (did I say their?) -- her mother, his wife, the innkeeper, who was in the kitchen in the bathroom in the office who was keeping to herself after a day of his constant monitoring at the private practice office they shared

the one with the Him on the couch, she's 16 or 17 or 18 or 19 or 20, this could have been any of those ages, I won't risk the static return by venturing to guess which one it was exactly. her limbs might have looked long and coltish and adult and her mouth would taste clotted and congealed and congenitaled and corpulent and contained and this moment lives in nobody's memory of her except his and her own because who can contain this kind of history? The parents and lovers who have heard the stories are longing to be rid of them, to shed their ears of the words as soon as they're spoken, as soon as the breath around each component syllable has cooled and I write because I don't want him to be the one still who knows me best in the world, most intimately, who knows all of my most fragmentary and unspeakable secrets.

Vomit up what I've told you, if you like. I'd like to. I think it's the only reason I used to drink to such excess -- heaving isn't something my body does on command. If you can do it, then we can all bear witness to the marshalled splatters, the detailed reserves, our history finally visible for all to see.