I remember when I first heard the wondrous Mx Justin Vivian Bond performing this song in a grotty faux-squat in Oval not long after I moved to London six years ago. JVB was covered in glitter and accompanied by the equally sparkly, angelic-looking Nath Ann. The song cut through everything else I saw that day because JVB imbibed it with such warmth, rawness and emotion. Originally 'Golden Age' was written and performed by transsexual punk chanteuse Bambi Lake and was about the Polk Street hustler scene in San Francisco in the 1970s. I got it in my head today because I was reflecting with sadness upon how much division there seems to be amongst so many trans people at the moment, queers as well. Of course we have differences and we aren't going to agree all the time and the 'can't we all just get along?' thing can be used to silence those with already marginalised voices, but recently I've seen a lot of queer and trans blogosphere discourse, particularly with gender, which has involved pretty strong lines being drawn around identities that for many of us are quite blurry. Of course we're gonna disagree on stuff but I worry when arguments become dogmatic and try to speak to an assumed shared experience which we don't all have, even if we use the same words. I identify as a trans boy but I know many people who ID the same with a completely different idea as to what that means. Julia Serano recently wrote a blog cautioning against generalising about the experiences and positioning of all trans women and all drag queens.
For me personally being queer was supposed to be about throwing the rule book out the window, but the more time I spend around queer public discourse (the internet) the more I find it has become a total protocall fest. And no one is even sure what the protocall is, hence we're all terrified when we take to our keyboards lest we say the 'wrong thing'. Theory is fine, disagreement is fine, but when arguments try to prove there is a correct way of actually being, living one's life or identifying, or ascribes a universal meaning onto the experience of a particular group we have a problem.
I feel really over judgement, dogma, censorship, us and them.
Anyways, I was thinking about this song today and how it evoked a sense of unity between trans people, hookers, drag queens, gays, queers and other awesome outcasts, so I looked it up and only discovered that they'd finally made a blooming video of it directed by Silas Howard (formerly of Tribe 8, who also made a pretty decent film for Valencia: the Movie/s) and Erin Greenwell. Vid is totally intergenerational and multi-gendered and features people like the amazing transgender activist and writer Kate Bornstein as well as the Brooklyn drag queens Merrie Cherry and Untitled Queen. Me being me, I missed the premiere two months ago and am only now discovering it. Oh well.
There's a good intro to it and discussion with the directors here but I really really like these two things Silas said about it which got me a bit emotional so I will quote them:
'The song takes place in the mid-1970's, an era Bambi describes as an innocent, "golden age" of hustling in a pre-AIDS San Francisco. Yet she side-steps romanticizing the era, honoring the loss of many in a community living on the edge of social acceptance. In this way I feel the song is timeless, speaking not only to the AIDS epidemic but also the crises of a diminishing landscape and the collateral cost for certain creative rebels.'
"I'm obsessed with the idea of queer and trans lineage and how the past and future can live in the same room. Perhaps it's in part due to coming of age in the midst of loss from AIDS, that I feel a kinship to the mentors gone too soon. Though Bambi wrote the song in the early '90s, in a community of "misfit" queers, sex workers, transsexuals, queers and punks, it speaks to a modern time in that many of us still look for places where all parts of ourselves can find home. I'm grateful to Justin Vivian Bond for carrying Bambi Lake's legacy forward, allowing us access to learn from Bambi as a performer and a punk transsexual icon of an older generation, who prevailed and created art that represented an experience of living outside the "mainstream." I think of the music video as a kind of love letter from our past to the next generation."
A FINAL NOTE: if you like Mx Bond, you will like prob like this cover of the Bahamian musician Exuma. I just remembered seeing them doing it live in Soho and it was pretty great.
I am not sure how many times I have watched this video now but I can tell you it's a lot. Song used, rapping and ostentatiously high budget video are all top notch, much like are Heems and Riz's dress sense. As usual I didn't watch this till a week ago and it's been out like a month or something but just in case you're as slow as me...
So the 'shit' meme surely died an over-saturated death about two years ago but I only recently came across this one and it is pretty funny and spot on. The questions 'But what do you really do?', 'What do you do? I mean apart from this?' and -as in the vid- 'This isn't a job, it's just something you do to make money' come up again and again in some form or other posed by therapists, friends and other random people I've told about my work. Some people try to come up with better career options for me without asking whether that's what I want. They ask me what is it I really want to do because they assume I couldn't possibly be happy being a sex worker. These questions have been asked of me an amazing number of times since I started doing sex work.
I watched a predictably annoying documentary about sex work the other night (though by no means the worst - it at least interviewed workers and critiqued the bizarre UK laws around brothel-keeping) where some uncharismatic hipster who used to work for vice went round asking various sex workers (though all cis women) about their work. Though the uncharismatic hipster got a range of answers she still drew her own conclusions and spouted off something earnest about the risks of sex work being high at the end. I won't pretend there are never any risks and of course this depends very much on a worker's particular situation (and laws that criminalise and stigmatise workers or clients, along with police harassment, definitely make working riskier) but to just round off with such an oversimplified single line which actually didn't reflect the experiences of all the workers she spoke to was pretty meaningless and not very useful or informative. In any case risk does not mean that we should have our agency denied us or that we're just victims to be pitied and rescued as some people seem to think (who if they actually cared about sex workers would listen to what we needed or support sex worker initiatives around safety and organising rather than trying to criminalise us and our clients).
One of the most infuriating attitudes is that if a sex worker doesn't enjoy the sex all the time then this is proof of victimhood. Though many of us do enjoy our work it's important to remember that in any profession NO ONE enjoys their work all the time and few people enjoy it most of the time. Generally speaking having sex with someone you're not attracted to and not particularly enjoying the sex isn't the end of the world for a lot of people and does not feel worse to everyone than doing any other job you feel so-so about, particularly if the hours are better. It seems to boil down to some weird out-dated moralistic idea that sex without love will kill your soul. But whilst most people can cope with the idea of one night stands/fucking someone you barely know it's harder for many to get their heads round someone being paid for it. Sex work is the best option for some people, it certainly was for me, but it seems like the hardest for so many others to respect. There are no exit programs for nine to five office jobs and surely this is where some of the greatest human misery accumulates. Of course sex work is not for everyone and if a person felt violated and traumatised every time they see a client then that is a very specific scenario but even so if a person who felt that way still chose to be a sex worker their choice should still be respected and rather than pathologising that person those with a saviour complex would do well to look at the impact of cuts, austerity measures and capitalism instead of assuming the worker has a false consciousness.
As a sex worker you can't talk publically about having a bad day at work without someone trying to exit you, where else does that happen? Rape/abuse are not the same as prostitution and conflating the two things together as many moralists (some who think they're feminist) do just adds to the whorephobic and often sexist myth that if these things happen to a hooker they are asking for it and they deserve it, therefore legitimising the behaviour of perpetrators when they commit these acts against a sex worker or someone they perceive to be a worker.
As I'm a trans guy who doesn't pass a lot as male I get the additional back-handed rhetoric where people feel the need to ask 'how's that going because you're quite niche aren't you?' or when I was telling someone things were quiet they responded by letting me know they had a friend who was a sex worker who made loads of money 'but she was really conventionally good looking'. Of course society's conventional ideals about looks/gender presentation are favored by a lot of clients and you can't exactly go work in a parlour if you look like me but comments like that are still pretty annoying, though sometimes I say them myself about myself so I don't even know exactly where I stand on people saying stuff like that. But I think it's still annoying. After I told someone I knew about a bad experience with a client they told me that when I have surgery and start taking hormones I'll get different types of clients and I can start to charge more and I avoid situations like that in future. That may be true seeing as the world is transphobic and sexist but it's still fucked up and to me it felt like she was saying, 'in your current circumstances you can't expect to be treated any better than that'. I think it's great for people to care about you if something shit happens and support is awesome but she didn't think to ask how I might strategise to deal with that stuff in the future it all came down to whether I would pass better as male. What if I didn't want to take hormones and have surgery?
Anyways if I ever get it together to make trashy queer hooker comedy youtube sketch show I will begin by having an earnest white middle class woman's voice overdubbing a scene in an office, reeling off some made-up statistics and talking about the terrible conditions in which these poor people have to work, how many of them came from abroad to the UK dreaming of starring in West End theater productions yet now they are temping eight hours a day for less than the living wage at a well-meaning if dubious and soul-sucking not-for-profit.
If I'm honest though I'm actually a bit bummed no one's ever asked me what the weirdest thing I've ever done was.
Having a deep love of operatic dark indie electro pop with bonus points if it's made by queers I instantly fell in love with the Canadian band Austra when I saw them supporting a terrible band (I'm way too nice to name names) in a half empty show at Brixton Windmill four years ago. Understandably they have gone on to be relatively huge since then whilst still being sickeningly young and talented and attractive, the kind of people who make me go oh shit my youth is over and I've achieved NOTHING. But I forgive them because their music is so good and my life would be worse without it. They also make amazing videos such as the lo fi dirtiness of the Beat and Pulse video and their latest one for Hurt Me Now which is like a david lynch inspired acid trip complete with a monster beheading. One I have been watching over and over again recently is their video for 'Forgive Me'.
I generally love anything that's shot in the woods in the middle of the night but particularly when combined with cruising, public sex, FEELINGS, neon and forgiveness. I like anything that has a dirty surface and hints at something more tender going on underneath although the video makes sex seem anything but dirty. I particularly liked that the starring role was given to a trans woman, Judy Virago, and it apparently shows a story of a sex worker who isn't being judged (although the director, Claire Edmonson, insists she's actually a bored housewife). When the band released the video they quoted Judy Virago's comments on it which really struck a chord with me:
"As a trans woman, the story of this video resonates pretty strongly with me. Society expects trans people and sex workers to apologize for their deviation from the norm and to explain themselves. Being cisgender is meant to be the default. So when a trans person is dating someone there are a lot of questions asked "does that mean your boyfriend is gay?" "how do you have sex?" ...the kinds of questions that most women don't get asked. This video asks no questions about the transgender woman featured and asks for no apology. She is loved, and she forgives."
I've identified as trans for a long time, since before I had the language or world around me where people like me would say 'I identify as trans'. I'm in a pretty privileged position in the queer/trans communities of which I am a part being masculine/ftm-ish, white, middle class. I actually get really bored going to trans or queer events and listening to people in a similar boat as me going on and on about their gender as though nothing and no one else in the world ever dealt with any shit. I find myself rolling my eyes and thinking can't we talk about something else for once? The thing is I'm also used to being referred to as 'he' etc in those environments which is completely right for me but when I get outside of there and try to address the rest of the world they invariably decide I'm female at least once I start talking and they hear my voice which grates on me and I find that I myself end up going on and on about being trans. At the same time I completely understand how people outside of a certain context only understand transgender in terms of hormones and operations because they've never heard of anything different but it's still annoying.
I study Creative Writing which has been a life saver for me in many ways. It keeps me focused on something I'm pretty good at and determined to improve upon. My course mates are really awesome and supportive but when you are writing about something based on your personal experience as a trans person or as a sex worker you instantly come up against a wall trying to explain stuff that you just know to those that aren't trans or sex workers.
Let's first deal with the trans stuff. If you want to write from the point of view of a trans person who hasn't taken hormones or had surgery and you want it to be understood in a mostly cis/straight environment you have to constantly reiterate that that person is trans. This is a little easier than being a trans person who hasn't done those things in such an environment because at least you get to write from inside the head of the trans person with them viewing themselves as whatever gender they are rather than whatever everyone else decides they are. You can't use words like 'cis' and 'genderqueer' if you want to write something that will be understood outside particular trans/queer communities because most cis/straight people won't understand them but actually a lot of trans and gender variant people don't use those words either; when I talk to trans people outside the very particular trans/queer vaguely lefty/activisty/anarcho community Ive known in the UK and US that becomes all the more apparent. Similarly the word 'queer' doesn't resonate with a lot of people who are in no way straight and this of course doesn't mean they are less politically enlightened. I don't think it's entirely fair to say these words are elitist, because although the queer scene can be very dominated by white, middle class, transmasculine types, people from all backgrounds/identities use words like queer/genderqueer/etc not just the super privileged, but we should still not start to assume this language is universal even amongst trans people. Anyway, when I write I want it to be understandable even by people who are so cis and straight they don't even know they're cis and straight because they've never had to think about those things. Or at least I want to aim for that, but I don't want to write specifically for them either, certainly not moreso than other trans people who I also don't write for specifically because my experience will invariably betray someone else's. Everytime you write something about being trans someone else is pissed off because now all the cis people think you have told the definitive story because they want to know the answer to what your particular brand of oddness means without understanding that there is no single answer just as there's no definitive experience of being cis or black or white or working class or gay or straight but everyone whether under-represented/willfully misrepresented/wiped off the fucking map by mainstream culture should be just as entitled to their own subjectivity in creative writing as cis straight white guys who never have to worry about representation.
I wrote a story for class recently which featured a guy (cis) who came up to the narrator (trans) and one of the first questions the cis guy asked the trans guy was 'have you had the surgery?' which is really typical, people ask that shit all the time after you tell them you're trans. The narrator responds by asking the cis guy what's in his pants and how his genital area has changed over the years which is the way I wish I'd responded whenever a complete stranger asked me that question, I mean apart from by a client because at least then it's relevant to the job. As Judy Virago says in her quote re the Austra video trans people are expected to explain themselves all the time. Some people in the class really liked the genital discussing bit but some also thought it signaled an over-reaction on the part of the narrator and evidently everyone whose ever asked me very casually as soon as I tell them I'm trans about surgery thinks it's an appropriate opening question when getting to know people. It's not enough for me to say I'm trans, they must work out WHY and identify the exact specimen and find out what I've got going on under my clothes because if it's not what they think it should be and it conflicts with the over-arching narrative in their head of the trans experience (usually they can understand a person only as medically transitioned transsexual) then it does not compute and surely I owe them an explanation.
With stories I write they only usually work if the narrator is very similar to myself (lack of imagination perhaps) so I've spent about a year and a half on my course finding different ways to explain how you can be trans even without medical treatment. I also emailed my class and asked them to refer to me with male pronouns because I want to insist on the same things outside of the trans community as I would within it even if people have trouble getting it and I also want people to know that hormones and surgery aren't the only way of being transgender. I want that to be common knowledge. But still I have to have really irritating conversations with the odd coursemate who tells me they don't see such and such as trans because 'she' (possibly the wrong pronoun) hasn't had hormones or surgery like it's the cis person's choice to say who's trans and who isn't. Like we have to have a medical seal of approval, like the only way to be a man or a woman if you were born otherwise is to pass as much as a cis person as possible. I'm not attacking those who choose hormones and surgery, I'm on the waiting list for hormones myself and I wouldn't rule out ever having surgery but I hate this idea that there is only one trans narrative and only one type of body which makes an authentically trans person. Justify why you have this body and if you're not going to change it justify how you can be trans. Someone from the course commented that the thing with questions about surgery was like people of colour getting pissed off by being asked 'where are you from?' They thought that in both cases people getting offended signified an over sensitivity (they were cis and white themselves if you hadn't already worked that out). In truth both these questions often mean something else. I remember a friend once pointing out, having been asked the question 'Where are you from?' a ridiculous number of times despite his English accent (and the asker wasn't referring to London or Manchester but where he was 'really' from), that when asked purely because someone's a person of colour that question is generally a code for 'Why aren't you white?' even if the person asking the question hasn't thought about it enough to realise that's what they're saying. 'Have you had surgery?' means something like 'Are you properly trans? Have you followed the correct procedures?' Of course if I knew someone well and it came up in conversation I wouldn't care about being asked about surgery/hormones, I've always been pretty open about that stuff, I mean I've just told the internet, it's on my OK Cupid profile, both of them, but what annoys me is that a person believes it's their god-given right to know.
Sex work is pretty hard to translate as well. I wrote a story based on a really bad experience I had with a client in very acute detail and I knew it would play into the whore-as-victim narrative no matter how much context I gave it. I understand people being freaked out by the story, it was pretty traumatic when it happened and I wanted to convey how it felt, also the people on my course aren't necessarily anti-sex work, but it didn't explain the whole story which was that overall sex work is the best option for me and I'm way happier now than when I was in full time work. Apart from the fact I sincerely doubt I can earn a sustainable living off it I would prefer to be doing this than any 9 to 5 stuff. I don't think under capitalism there's really such a thing as free choice, that we are obligated to work for synthetic currency in any capacity is ridiculous, if we're lucky we make the best of different options -where there are options- at a particular time. I spend a lot of time in environments where there are lots of other sex workers and it's self-evident sex work shouldn't be criminalised or abolished but that workers should be able to work as safely as possible and without stigma and be able to continue working or leave if they wish to but coercion either way is wrong. With that shared understanding it feels ok to talk about sex work, including bad experiences, without having to justify why be a sex worker. Writing about it for the rest of the world sometimes feels like a betrayal, as writing about trans sometimes feels like a betrayal. You have to spend so much time explaining yourself you are reduced to an identity and you reduce yourself to one because you are forever explaining. And you can't ever translate properly what you've been through, not even to other trans people or sex workers although you can try.
A friend of mine who works as a translator told me that when translating across languages you often lose something from the original text because there are simply is no words for a particular concept in the language it's being translated into. Maybe here the act of translation can be the act of building something new but the full original meaning remains obscured. I'm tragically mono linguistic and yet I feel like I'm always trying to work out a way of translating experience into something someone else will understand and sometimes wonder why bother explaining anything at all? If the whole work of telling a story involves trying to translate rather than telling the actual story why not just leave the translation altogether and if whoever reads it is lost, let them be lost. But I don't know, maybe it's that thing where everyone dies alone but it doesn't stop us spending our entire lives reaching out for other people.
So I don't usually make new year's resolutions but this year I made about 16. One of them was to give up drinking which lasted until my 1st January Bloody Mary but I figure it's OK to break that one because I didn't really mean it. I mean cutting down is perhaps a better idea because I enjoy being drunk but I know it fuels my anxiety and depression if I drink for too long a period of time in a row. But anyways this Bloody Mary had several different types of vegetable in it so I feel the nutritional value outweighs any ill-effects that may come from the vodka. This was in the Castro in San Francisco and then my friends and I went to Dolores Park and drank cheap wine from brown paper bags (illustrative pictures to follow when I get back to the UK). Gotta be done right? Anyways that wasn't the most important resolution.
I'm not one for traditions but as aforementioned I have the good fortune to be in the US right now (currently on Ocean Beach in San Diego in a hippie coffee shop - their wifi network is called 'World Peace') nearing the end of a West Coast road trip and even on the plane on the way out here I was mentally plotting changes I wanted to make, but having really wonderful conversations with old and new friends here has made me evermore determined with some of this stuff.
Hearing the minutiae of other people's existence can be pretty boring so I won't go into all of the resolutions. I fear writing about any of this stuff is pretty self-indulgent but one of the things I resolved to do was start blogging again just so I know I'd be writing something at least once a week and it would be up for public consumption to get over my fears that what I write or express about myself is never good enough. This links on to an even bigger resolution which was to attempt to try and feel less shame or at least limit the impact it has on my life. One of the reasons I stopped writing a blog and one of the reasons I write a lot less than I want to is the fear of judgement. Traditionally I start blogs and then delete them or drop them because I think what I write is embarrassing/self-indulgent/bad/wrong/not good enough. I think this is probably a common theme with most bloggers and writers. Knowing what to share and what not to share about yourself is a tension that exists for everyone, particularly writing, particularly in an age where everything is accessible by everyone on the internet but, at least for me, if I don't attempt to do something with my writing there's no point.
This blog is coming from someone too dazed from long road trips to have a proper conclusion, so I'm gonna sign off and wander the beach some more before I go back to London and my broken boiler in a few days time.
