The BS Bingo is a three beaded butt plug made by BS Atelier, a small toy company in Spain that makes really artistic dildos, plugs, leather harnesses, cuffs, and rope. They offer a great selection of silicone, all beautifully poured into designs that range from the splattery Noise pattern to their bovine Vaca, a cow print without being fully zoomorphic akin to what some companies do. I’ve always wanted one of BS’s products, but found their dildos to be a little on the small side when seeing them in person. When I saw their Rainbow Bobo butt plug on SheVibe, I fell in love, but wasn’t too sure of the dimensions. It looked a little too long and the diameter made me wonder if it would be too big. I skipped around and came to the Bingo in a beautiful shade of light blue with a rainbow base. The measurements sounded much more tolerable, and it turns out they were.
The Bingo is three beads versus Bobo’s four beads, and is only a little thicker than my pointer finger at its widest bead. When I first held the Bingo, I was admittedly nervous at how soft and squishy the silicone was. I’ve always loved squishy silicone for front hole penetration but didn’t have luck with anal play. When using the Vixen Tristan 1 plug, the squishiness had too much give and made the plug difficult to insert, having to guide the tip with my fingers and hold the base of the neck so it didn’t go slipping around my butthole once lubed up. I worried that it would be a similar case with the Bingo, but I was so wrong. Because the Bingo is such a modest size (for me), my ass took it in immediately. As in, my butt ate it. One bead slipped in, and where I usually have to guide a plug in (especially with beads), my butt took in the rest of the plug until the base fit snugly against me. It was so easy, so comfortable…I feel like even on my most tense days I could handle the Bingo with no problem.
The Bingo’s not huge, sure. It doesn’t give me that sensation of being totally filled up like other plugs do, especially because of the softness of it. It conforms to my ass so nicely that at times, I can barely feel it. Which is actually SUPER exciting because I think I’ve finally found a plug I can wear for long periods of time. It bends so naturally that I feel like if I were sitting and moving around in different positions, it wouldn’t be pokey or uncomfortable at all. The softness of the Bingo made it perfect for double penetration. Usually when I have a plug in and I use a dildo at the same time, the thrusting of a dildo in my front parts will make my pelvic floor ache in not-so-good ways. This is usually because of the angles or pinching of the plug against my tissue.
If this doesn’t happen, it’s usually because a plug has a gentler graduation from the insertable to the stem, but then plugs that fit this category usually end up popping out of my butt if I’m attempting double penetration. The Bingo did neither of these things. It stayed put, and it stayed squishy, accommodating all sorts of insertables from my Vr6 which has a pretty severe bulb in terms of angle, hardness, and girth, to my Raptor, which is the harder Tantus silicone and pretty fucking thick. The Bingo also stayed in during orgasm, when my muscles contract the most, so I was really happy about all of this.
I find that I don’t really handle the Bingo much once it’s inside of me, whereas my partner loves using it roughly on himself. He says the softness and smaller size allow him to thrust it, bend it, whatever he wants without it being pokey on the sides of his rectum (which is often a concern for him and anal toys). It also doesn’t hit his prostate, which is a bonus, as my partner doesn’t really like prostate orgasms. It’s funny…I never told him how quickly my ass “ate” the Bingo, when one evening at work I received a picture on my phone from him subtitled “NOM NOM NOM.” Maybe it’s the candy-colored aesthetic, maybe it’s just coincidence, but I got a chuckle that both of our reactions upon first use of this toy were so similar.
My butt is the person on the left.
Also, I guess if you’re into MLP: FiM and Rainbow Dash, this plug could be your gig. I will admit I’m super excited to bring it to my next play party to see who makes that association. Overall, I’m thrilled with this buy, and definitely recommend the Bingo to anyone who wants a gentle plug with beaded graduations.
Content advisory: Poop. So much poop. And a lot of CAPS LOCK.
I’ve been putting off writing for a little while. Life has been throwing a lot at me, what with my hands dipped in all things sexuality-related, board meetings at Masakhane, eldercare wellness-therapy groups, trying to negotiate new degree tracks at Widener, and now being offered an opportunity to speak on the politics of identity and sex toys for Widener’s CareersCon coming up in September. The semester is approaching, and I am coloring testicles furiously in an Anatomy book while watching “It’s Complicated” with Meryl Streep because that’s apparently what $1,800 costs for a class, though I will admit I am excited to have other classes with Elizabeth Schroeder and in a different class I get to profess my love for Judith Butler. Academia has its upsides and downsides.
This took me two hours to finish. >__>
Anal August is coming to a close and with it so are the doors of Come As You Are Co Op; life is aligning with the ebbs and flows of sexuality. After hosting a last minute poll as to what the subject nature of this post should be, it seems as though folks were interested in hearing about my horrific history with anal beads. I figured this was appropriate, given the topic of my upcoming workshop about sex toys and Formidable Femme’s most recent amazing blogpost. (Also a huge fan of this blogpost from Lilly in 2015). (And this one from Hey Epiphora!). You get the idea. My relationship with anal beads is paradigmatic of many things I find really fucking wrong with the sex toy industry, and I’m kinda glad I got to experience this learning curve in the way I did.
My first experience with any sort of butt play was at age 16 with an unlubricated attempt at my then boyfriend’s dick partially in my ass. This was followed by the “Oh my god NO, ouch, why did we do that, BAD IDEA BAD IDEA” dance/hop all around the apartment with my hands clasped around my buttcheeks. I had sworn off anal for another two years until college came when someone I started hooking up with introduced me to fingers and lube. THEN a dick. MUCH easier. MUCH more pleasurable. Particularly with a vibrator on my clit. I found that orgasming with a dick in my ass provided an incredibly intense orgasm, and decided butt play was for me.
Winter break came our freshman year and partner and I stopped by a little leather shop on Christopher Street in the village and decided to buy a black large jelly rubber butt plug which we later realized would never in a million years fit inside my ass. I ended up using it vaginally. (I know, what?)
[Insert generic rubber butt plug here.] Or don’t, actually.Years went by until I graduated college with much more knowledge in sexuality (heck, even a BA in it), began teaching sex ed for Masakhane, and started working at my local sex shop. For the next six years working at this sex shop, I used my 50% discount with reckless abandon. I bought hundreds of toys, spending each paycheck exploring the best and worst our store had to offer. And looking up at my toy shelf right now, I see all of 10 of those remaining. I’d try a toy and it’d either break, melt, I’d decide it wasn’t for me, it didn’t fit right, whatever. In retrospect, I wish I kept every single one of them because some serious science could have been done. Lilly’s Jar of Horrors? I could have made some sort of art installation! Hindsight…20/20…ableist idiom, but so true.
The first thing I heard about butt toys working at the store is how amazing anal beads were. “You know how good it feels taking a shit? Now imagine having an orgasm while taking a shit. Blumpkin level.” My colleagues were precious. I mean that sincerely. The honesty and crudeness of our conversations was something I still can’t have in a lot of other spheres. Even in the rest of my sexuality fields, I don’t know how comfortable I’d be casually watching porn at 9am while eating a taylor ham, egg, and cheese and commenting on the skill of a performer’s messy blowjob.
Anal beads were one of my first purchases with my newly acquired 50% discount. Not just any anal beads mind you. These. Tiny ones, green (because color was a huge factor in choice for me during my early purchase days, not material), connected with string knots, and a plastic green loop at the end. I used them twice. Once by myself, where they hurt immensely while taking them out, each knot scraping my insides, actually feeling the skin of my rectum catch in between each knot and bead as I pulled the string out of me. I used a ton of lube, but it didn’t matter. I still bled on toilet paper for two days.
The second time I used them was with my partner during sex. I asked him to pull them out of me while I was riding him on top with a bullet on my clit. As I was orgasming and he pulled them out, he yanked them way too fast, and while it felt better than the previous time, what he had hanging in his hand was mirrored by his face of horror. I didn’t need to look at either before the smell had hit me. The strand of beads were completely stained brown, each knot had caught a little bit of feces. I’m not talking a ton of poop here, but enough that by the swinging of the beads, the sweat of sex and the humidity of a Jersey summer, my boyfriend’s outstretched hand wafted the stink of shit from these beads while he looked at me asking “what do I do with these?” That ended our session pretty quickly, as I ran to the sink to scrub them out. Scrub them out. NOT throw them away! I put them in a wad of paper towels, left them in his basement to be forgotten, only so two months later his mom and little brother could find them and ask him about the plastic green bracelet behind his computer desk. Awful.
Not so funny when it happens to you.
So I learned the hard way: No string, check. Bacteria, knots, pain, hard to clean, etc. Get beads that are connected, Avery! I fixed my eyes on these really funky looking beads that weren’t bead shaped at all, but rather shaped like little, fat, S‘s connected all with the same material. The same, disgusting smelling material that reeked so bad I could smell it through the packaging. It literally smelled the same as that Cherry scented dildo, minus the fruity notes. Like burnt medicine and shower curtains. All the typical phthalate signs I hadn’t learned about yet. But the texture wasn’t tacky (actually quite bumpy, which added to the disaster later on), and nowhere on the package did it say jelly, so I scooped it up. And then it scooped me up. Yes, these S-shaped nodules were absolutely perfect shit-scoopers. What I thought would stimulate my asshole upon exit and entry ended up provoking the SAME reaction in the SAME position with the SAME partner when I asked him to remove them. This strand of S‘s went even deeper into my butt, scooped out generous portions of feces per bead, and once removed I couldn’t tell what smelled more, the original material or this newer, poop-enhanced version. Not to mention the bumpy texture was a complete lube-eater, so we had a nice slathering of Santorum going on with this item as well.
The brand I bought doesn’t exist anymore, but this is what the beads were shaped like.
You’d think I’d learn. Ok, so maybe I just need ROUND anal beads. But maybe I should get graduated ones, where they get really tiny at the tip and wider at the bottom. And maybe we can make them vibrate this time! Because why not add a new variable into the mix of something already really uncertain and discouraging? But I’ll be really good about it, I’ll make sure they’re silicone this time, because when a reputable company like TOPCO says it’s silicone, it HAS to be silicone, right? The insertable bullet transmitted zero vibration throughout the beads. The handle ripped and I almost lost the entire toy inside of me. We ended up grabbing the beads by the bullet when the bullet, in all its lubed glory, popped out of the toy. So after sticking a finger in the hole where the bullet USED to be and slowly negotiating this toy out vof my rectum by holding one end of the ripped handle and keeping one finger in the bullet-hole, I was able to decide that “MAYBE I DON’T FUCKING LIKE ANAL BEADS.”
Dude, the handle was SO flimsy.
I know there are some good ones out there. Tantus makes some impressive Vibrating Progressive Beads. Fun Factory will always be famous for their Flexi Felix. But something about that sensation of shitting tiny turds I thought would feel so pleasurable a decade ago has absolutely zero appeal to me now. Don’t get me wrong. I love textured plugs. The Tantus Ripple feels absolutely amazing. I adore the Aneros Helix, even if it isn’t my current partner’s favorite. I can even handle the beaded end of the Fun Wand if I’m gentle enough. It’s just something about a loooong chain of bumps that my body can’t handle.
So there you have it. Anal bead mistakes were made. By a so-called “sexpert.” Which is why, with all the good toys out there, there are twice as many terrible ones. With even the most informed educators, we have the capacity for human error and need the space to learn and share those learning experiences (no matter how grotesquely crappy they can get). Sex-positive or not, whatever sex-positive means to you, we do stupid shit to our bodies all the time. We’re not always going to make the best decisions in life, and wisdom isn’t always a forward trajectory.
I’d like to think that my anal bead blunders are over, but I’m sure there will be a day down the road where I reflect on other practices in my sexual self-care that need improvement. I know there were moments working at the store in my later years where I had flickers of judginess at the customers who bought that string of green anal beads. I desperately tried getting my boss to take it off the shelves, but “It kept selling,” so we kept stocking it. Some days I’d do my best to offer a safer alternative. Some days I’d remember back to the moment I bought those beads. Would I really have listened if someone told me to pick something else? Probably not. My stubborn ways would have said, “No, this is cheaper, it’s my favorite color, and I don’t even know if I’m going to like it. I’m going with these.” You pick your battles and hope for the best. But that’s another story.
Today marks the one week anniversary of a journey into two conferences I never in a million years thought I would have had the balls to attend, much let alone participate actively. From Thursday morning until Sunday evening, I spent my time in Alexandria, Virginia at the Woodhull Sexual Freedom Summit, and from Monday morning until Wednesday evening I was in Philadelphia for the Transgender Training Institute’s Training of Trainers. Right now I am typing this blog entry fully aware that I will be taking breaks, maybe to get a cookie, maybe to switch a load of laundry (of which there are so many), maybe to watch an episode of Pokemon Indigo League on Netflix, or maybe just to cry. It’s possible I may abandon this entry altogether, and it’s possible I may put it down for the evening when my partner comes home so I can spend some time with him as we have not seen each other in a week and have much to catch up on.
Avery’s cautious optimism – Day 1 Woodhull
I had so many ideas for directions in which I wanted this entry to go. As my week progressed, I talked with my peers about how I wanted to write about my experience, each idea changing, refining into something not completely new or different but a lesson scaffolded onto another lesson. Where the beginning of my week I focused quite bitterly on my sense of being outcast from a blogging community I had expected to welcome me with open arms, a community that treated me like the new kid on the block in not so nice ways, I also realized this was a community made up of individuals going through their own shit and experiencing a drastic change in social environment in their own ways as well. I tried to empathize via messages I was learning about mental health through amazing workshops, but my own mental health and the difficulty I had processing a recent failed relationship with underpinnings of emotional abuse left me untrusting of those around me and suspicious of why people were not extending hands of support when I consistently asked for them, be it through social media, during audience participation, or outright face to face in hallway conversation. I found myself feeling not welcome in blogger spaces, and grappled with how much of this was a projection of my own insecurities and how much was legitimate. Had I been identified as the “needy new neurodivergent blogger with overambitious aspirations of making friends?” Everyone seemed settled with their groups. I felt invasive.
Fleeting negative thoughts were carefully mitigated with the positivity of a community I had known for years, friends and lovers I had known for decades, partners of partners, educational cohorts that have now become lovers, this huge mishmash of intersectional (in the least trivial sense of the word) eros that was aggressively unapologetic, forcing me under their wings. I find myself crying right now thinking about my gratitude for a queerness of bodies and minds that didn’t just give me permission to join them, but danced with me until the day I walked back to my car, smelling them and feeling them and imagining their words and spirits and the grazes of their beard on my thighs and their giggles around the lube bottles I had tried gagging them with and the cupcakes I had licked off their fingers and the way their underwear rippled when I beat them gently and the beauty of their tattoos and the violence in their hand gestures as they spoke of the illusions in idolatry and the way pool water made their t-shirt float all around them and I thought GOD I WANT TO BE THAT T-SHIRT and I thought, “I love you people.” I fucking love you people.
So much love.
I was so proud to be a part of that brilliance. I was so thrilled to share true magic, in all of its wooey exuberance, with my hematite in one hand and the possibility of failure in the other, and know that no matter where I ended up this week, I would fail beautifully and with people who were willing to help me. I reaffirmed my beliefs in the humanness of wanting to be happy vicariously. If I saw others crying, my heart hurt. The stories I heard, the microaggression activities and other practices of facing transphobia during my TOT Conference, there was so much pain. At one point my cohort, Emily Nagoski turned to me and said “You know what, Avery, I kinda like that you identify ‘punk’ as one of your genders.” And I do. I think I need that hardness. Because if I spent all this time in my heart, in this empathy and in this affect, I’d fucking flounder.
Private queerspace play party at Woodhull!
So these two conferences taught me to feel. They taught me that when I get defensive, I intellectualize, I overanalyze, I try to get into other people’s heads, I reflect on the past, I try to do exactly what I’m doing now. I don’t feel because it’s a completely fucking vulnerable place. Case in point: where I was in tears writing the paragraph about my experiences at Woodhull I was a sobbing mess. Right now, I am dissociated to the point of disinterest, to the point of ending the entry and wondering why I wrote it in the first place.
Mental health wise, I am a person with Bipolar Disorder, Borderline Personality Disorder, and several instances of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Sometimes these blend wonderfully to make me a hyperaware, feelings-sensitive, intelligent being who is very careful with my assumptions. Sometimes the blends bring me to other places, some good, some great, some downright horrible. I don’t have any complete or concluding verdicts to round up my experiences at Woodhull or the TOT to make this a digestible blog post. I’ll probably revisit it and do quite a bit of editing and adding later on. But something needed to be said. Something deserved to be written. It has been a powerful, emotionally exhausting, and life-changing week to the point where I’m not quite sure who I am right now (I thought today was Friday for a few hours).
Second to last day at TOT, burnout imminent.
One final thing I want to say about Woodhull, though I’m not sure the order it should be included in this entry, but I wanted to put it in before I forget it, is how much the last week has taught me about the concept of status in the field of Sexuality. Whether a blogger, educator, sex worker, activist, clinician, so much more that I feel partially terrible for marginalizing the “so much more” bit, you are important for whatever you do. Not like I need to be the one validating your work, but still. I saw so many “famous” and “well-known” people this week that were just fucking humans like everyone else. I even feel a little guilty for name-dropping Emily Nagoski and am debating that redaction…going to sit on it for a bit and why I felt the need to include that. I had so many great conversations with all of these “big names” this week and didn’t tweet them, didn’t tell anyone else about them, because I respected them for what they were, great conversations. And I’m a little salty and a lot confused why celebrity has become a thing in the field of sexuality. I get the whole giving creedence and respect. I definitely agree with live tweeting hashtagging and giving proper citation for brilliant ideas being generated during workshops. But when I see stuff like “OMG selfie with ___ look who I just met!” I’m left with a really puzzled feeling. I don’t really know what that feeling is, other than maybe fear of capitalist tendencies or going back to that status of not being the cool kid I discussed in the earlier parts of my blog, but it’s like, we’re all part of one community here. One of the “celebs” I was hanging out with after Woodhull said they deliberately wore a hat the entire time because they wanted to avoid that kind of response, and I totally get it. Like, maybe they’re here to learn, too?
I mean, my toy lineup from our play party made me semi-famous the morning after.
When I went to the Transgender Training of Trainers, Dr. Green even said something along the lines of “Yeah, you can totally tell people you passed this course…you get a certificate, you know! But you don’t have to go throwing my name around, even though technically it is my course!” When you use the image of a celebrity, big name, well-established community figure, when you name-drop, what kind of agency are you taking from that person? What kind of subalternity are you creating and in a community promoting sex-positivity; do we really want to get that gross about it? To me, it just cheapens the whole idea.
Yes, I am super fucking proud of myself for pulling through this week. I most definitely had a deep con-drop on Sunday night, collapsing on a dear friends chaise lounger in the dark and calling my partner in Jersey on the phone crying, “I can’t do the next three days, I don’t even have the energy to shower.” But I fucking pulled my shit together, I smelted one last spoon, and I held my own during this training. So yeah, I’m going to toot my own horn. I’m going to be confident for the first time in a long fucking time and say, “Not only did I do the thing, but I did the thing FUCKING WELL!”
So thank you to Woodhull and TOT for helping me feel all the feels, and to reduce my temptation to get Butlerian with this entry and to let it come from my heart.
and Thor said, “I’m gonna kill ’em all with my hammer, like I killed the giants.”
As part of our Business of Blogging course with Epiphora and JoEllen Notte (The Redhead Bedhead) this past spring, my fellow bloggers and I were given the task of coming up with an origin story…something that encapsulated our desires to blog about sex, sexuality, identity, toys, and all the other delightful things we write about on a regular basis. I loved this assignment so much; it gave each member of our cohort such unique opportunities to express our backgrounds in so many different formats. It was a delightful way to learn about each other and I had tons of fun writing it. So here it is, in all its unedited glory:
The concept of an “Origin Story” has put Hedwig and the Angry Inch’s “Origin of Love” in my head on a loop all week with the simultaneous imagery of Weapon X from the Marvel universe (Uncanny X-men story arc ALWAYS). And I’ve sort of been traversing head and heart for my story. Do I illustrate a mosaic of snapshots from my life with a lens covered in more vaseline than RuPaul’s Drag Race seasons 1 and 2? Do I pick one cathartic moment and deconstruct that in order to respect its own value as life is full of origin stories? And then I realized my “Origin Story” had been staring me in the face the whole time. Hedwig and X-men. So what’s the connection to blogging, toys, my passions for sex education, sexual self-discovery and exploration?
First of all, I had discovered both Hedwig and the Angry Inch and X-men comics at hugely transformative stages of my life. I was around 7 years old when X-men entered my life. It was one of the first cartoons I ever really engaged with, the first arcade game I punched rolls of quarters into, the first comic series I began reading, and Goddess help me, when that 1994 Fleer Trading Card Series came out, the first thing I had ever began collecting feverishly (I still have every card, mint condition, in a plastic binder on my bookshelf).
That wig was the WORST.
I understood the higher value of the foil cards that shimmered with their metallic colors, the importance of collecting every card for the triptych stories in order to get the full picture, and I also loved talking about collecting these cards with other kids. It reminds me a lot of my sex toy collecting now. Between my highest quality “gets,” to fawning over other collectors’ toy displays, to wishing for those “rares” that were in such limited production that even if I didn’t want them, I NEEDED them, my appreciation for the different artists and aesthetics in the ’94 Fleer Set was really precocious for a 9 year old kid.
The characters in X-men have also been an evolving (see what I did there?) inspiration throughout my life. As a child, I dressed up as Storm for Halloween one year and Jubilee the next. In my preteen years, X-men gave me an immense respect for powerful women, but simultaneously allowed me to eroticize them, as my first fantasies as a kid were Psylocke and Polaris. Purple and green is still my favorite color combination, go figure. As I got older, and began to understand the political context behind X-men as mutant “others” and my own morphing (again, X-men puns) LGBTQ identity, I saw these characters less as fictional impossibilities and more as realistic role models than most celebrities in early 2000’s culture.
When the live action movies began coming out, I sort of twinged at their “artistic license” with the canon, but was really excited that they were getting more people interested in X-men…people that previously may not have considered themselves “comic folk” or “superhero affiliated.” It’s sort of like how Sex and the City and Fifty Shades of Grey are all types of frustrating and problematic as introductions to sex toys, but they create dialogue among audiences that might never have happened, and that is something of merit. I was also really jazzed that Bryan Singer, one of the directors for several of the movies, was openly bisexual until I heard about all the cases of sexual abuse filed against him. My heart dropped. As a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, it created a lot of conflict as to whether I wanted to continue supporting X-men films, where that would compromise my ethics, or if it might trigger me along the way.
I liken this a lot to my immediate knee-jerk reactions to companies like JimmyJane affiliating themselves with larger, “morally corrupt” corporations like Pipedream or concurrently wondering why She-Vibe continues to stock JimmyJane products. I see that when inserting my own personal narrative into someone else’s decisions without understanding the individual perspectives of everyone involved, it is really difficult to control my emotional reactions. I couldn’t rationalize any positives in the X-men films, for example, Anna Paquin, who is also openly bisexual and a proactive figure within several advocacy groups, and I was quick to write off an X-men movie if Bryan Singer had any affiliation with it. So this is definitely an ongoing battle of mediating my own impulse to “throw the baby out with the bathwater,” which is something that will require extensive work if my blogging aims to explore sociopolitical subtexts behind the production and promotion of sex toys.
Yup. This was a thing. This was absolutely a thing.
Where the X-men had jumpstarted my sexual exploration in childhood and LGBTQ affiliations in teen years, Hedwig and the Angry inch engaged my sensitivity to self in terms of love, mental well-being, and using my “rebel roots” to connect with people instead of isolating. My early angsty teens were fueled by punk rock, Ani Difranco, and a complete transformation into masculine-leaning androgyny. I hadn’t begun identifying as genderqueer, but after seeing Hedwig in my best friend’s living room my sophomore year, I learned that just like my fluid understandings of gender, my ideas of appearing “hard” and “soft” to people were equally blurry. It became the pitch for my sex education from undergrad onward: because I looked “alternative,” I was actually “accessible.” People would understand that I wasn’t judging them because I was probably always being judged. Hedwig taught me to embrace my vulnerabilities in praxis, that I’m not going to get anywhere in life without taking risks, and that mistakes are a part of the process.
But most of all, Hedwig taught me love in a profound way. I learned about love as a spiritual process, love as a means of connecting to people, love as a foundation for creation, love as the element that runs through everything we do as humans. And today, it still holds true. Every paper I have written, every thesis, practicum, or capstone I have ever worked on has emphasized the importance of love in your work. It is the great equalizer in that it is indefinable and yet always felt in some form. I use love in how I teach students, how I work with clients in therapy, I am using love right now in how I write this entry. It is nebulous, explosive of time and space, heady yet simple, spectral beyond anything narrowed down to a “concept.” I still write anonymous letters to randomized addresses I find from whitepages.com telling people “I have no idea who you are, but you are beautiful and I love you.” It’s worth doing. Love makes this all worth doing.
Reflecting on X-men and Hedwig and the Angry Inch, I think not only of Stan Lee and John Cameron Mitchell, but everyone else that has had input in the creation and writing of these stories. These stories are rich with value, complexity in symbolism that are universal enough that almost anyone can connect with them, but nuanced enough that they are not two-dimensional and individuals can take away different messages. These writers are absolutely brilliant at their craft and it takes a network of support and years of effort to achieve such excellence. But they are also unique as human beings, they had their own “Origin Stories” to bring them to writing.
Everyone has an origin story, if not one, than many, or even infinite. Some may say every moment is a new opportunity for an origin story. I am curious to hear yours, if you’d be willing to share. If you click on this entry, it will take you to the post where you can add your comments, or you can email me.
Please be aware of the “content” in this entry before you continue reading. (I still don’t know how I feel about the labels “Trigger” or even “Warning,” because they can sometimes be alarmist and also paint my authenticity as negative. If anyone has suggestions for how to label blog posts with sensitive topic material, please let me know.) This entry is going to deal with some of my histories with addiction, substance abuse, emotional abuse, and my current relationship with sobriety.
So I made my official decision to stop drinking and using cannabis around Labor Day of last year. I am hesitant to scroll through text messages to figure out the exact day because I don’t want to quantify my sobriety in terms of an anniversary. I’ve found that sobriety, much like many other things in my life, has been a very fluid, spectral concept. I know it is not always this way with other people and it may not always be this way during my trajectory. Growing up in a music scene that was heavily populated by straight-edge folks, I know that some may frown upon what appears to be a lack of commitment, but the ideologies behind abstinence make me really squirmy.
I decided to stop drinking as a response to many years of binge events, nights where I would use alcohol to allay social anxiety but instead I would turn into a monstrously abusive person. When drunk, not tipsy, not buzzed, but full-on hammered, I would become so reckless that I picked verbal fights with loved ones, had sex with people without even learning their names, drove drunk, pissed in public (my first experience at age 15 was on a cop car in Spain after downing a pint of vodka), threw up, chain smoked, and did virtually anything I could think of to be the center of attention.
This shot glass never got washed because it was constantly in use.
My first year at undergrad, I was on the planning committee for one of the biggest LGBTQ events of the semester, and I ended up getting alcohol poisoning before the dance even started. I was one of a dozen students that ended up being hospitalized for acute alcohol intoxication, and DIVA Night was cancelled for almost a decade following this incident. So many people from my Pride Alliance, the Women’s and Gender Studies Department, and other feminist organizations I was a part of were commenting on how, if you needed to be that drunk for a night based in Drag and “gender-bending,” you clearly had some insecurities about attending an LGBTQ event. Even more humiliating, a fellow student had filmed me getting carried out of my dorm in a stretcher into the ambulance, and used it for her documentary about DIVA night. So there I was, outed to these organizations I was a part of, a queer kid with a drinking problem whose irresponsibility had now been lumped in with speculations of internalized homophobia.
The “Gay House” bowl collection, 2003.
And I did nothing to improve my reputation. I moved out of the dorms to the LGBTQ off-campus housing, which was a huge deal because I was a freshman living with all seniors, and we ended up being one of the bigger stoner houses in our complex. I lived in LGBTQ houses for the rest of my years in undergrad, carrying the stoner reputation with me in my social life, battling a brief cocaine addiction in my antisocial life, and drinking what I thought were normal amounts according to college standards. I mean, I hung out with kids who had a phrase called “Puke and Rally,” where you kept drinking even after throwing up. Drinking to the point of vomiting once a month is totally normal, right?
A fruit Belgian side-project we named “Queer Beer.”
College ended, and the local microbrew scene greeted me with open arms when I moved back home. My dad and I began brewing our own beer and we enrolled in our local pub’s beer program, where you had to drink every kind of beer they offered in order to win all sorts of points, perks, and prizes. All my friends became obsessed with this pub, which I had been eating at since I was a small child. I became really chummy with the owners and staff…I even got a tattoo of their logo on my forearm one drunken night in my basement by a guy I was buying weed from and cheating on my current partner with. Most of the beers there were high ABV (alcohol percentage), and I would still chug them like they were Bud Light. I did gain an appreciation and knowledge of different beers (along with 30 pounds), but it was mostly just an excuse to binge drink three times a week, go to my friends house down the street to smoke weed, and attempt a very foggy drive home. How I have lived my life without any DUIs is an absolute blessing beyond comprehension.
I went right from getting the tattoo to showing it off at the bar. Ugh…Flights were a personal favorite when I was the designated driver.
When I moved to California for six months, I began to develop a completely new relationship with cannabis, using it medically to replace my prescriptions for insomnia and anxiety. I found that by smoking, I rarely drank alcohol, and my cannabis use was also relatively infrequent (maybe once or twice a week if I was having a tough time sleeping or had a big social event in San Francisco). The level of responsibility and accuracy of treatment, plus the attitudes of my friends around me towards cannabis was totally foreign. It was no longer a substance to abuse, but a medium to titrate in order to regulate daily life. I don’t want to glorify it, there were certainly still people abusing cannabis in California, but the general attitudes were much more mature than anything I had ever experienced on the East Coast. When I moved back home to Jersey, I brought what little of my prescribed cannabis I had left and lived off of that until it was gone. I will not buy anything illegally here, mostly because I have no idea what strains I am smoking or whether it is benefitting my mental state, but also because a lot of the mindset around here still treats cannabis like a fucking novelty. It has its place for recreation, I understand, but I can’t be around people who use it like that given my efforts towards sobriety and clearer thinking.
I used to glorify my substance abuse by trying to take “artsy” pictures.
So if I were to ever start using medical cannabis again… would that mean I was no longer sober? I’m not sure. I was able to maintain self-awareness and was never abusive when using medical cannabis. At my SMART meetings, they tell us that if we are on psych meds, it is absolutely acceptable. I had to take Norco (an opioid) during my back surgery, and I did so responsibly. There is a difference between using chemicals as medicine and as an escape. When I think of my sobriety, I think of a very strong mindfulness that comes with levels of responsibility to myself and others.
What I do know is that I am not abusive when I am sober. That is the only sure thing I understand so far. Living a sober life these past ten months has taught me new introspection, new methods of social interaction, given me new confidence, and kept my anger at bay. Most importantly, sober life has saved my relationship with my primary partner. Where we spent every night drinking and every weekend drunk, frequently blowing up these intoxicated evenings into fights and days of not talking, my partner and I communicate more now than I have in any previous relationships (poly family excluded, they have been outstanding communicators). We emotionally process each other’s feelings now, we slow the pace of our conversations, and we check our assumptions.
We also drink inhuman amounts of coffee, tea, and seltzer.
During these ten months I have had a drink or two, and I don’t consider it a “fall from the wagon.” I have enjoyed a nice glass of red wine with my family for my father’s 60th, and I definitely had a Manhattan to honor the death of my grandma who drank one before her evening programs until the day she died. My beautiful partners in Philadelphia made me a soul-warming Hot Toddy for Boxing Day with their family. These have been significant moments with what I consider libations in the most fundamental sense of the word. I have not consumed these drinks for the sake of intoxication, but rather to honor the moment and its rarity in my ongoing commitment to remain sober for the sake of myself and the ones I love.
I still pee in public these days, but with a much more discerning eye, and usually with a functional objective rather than drunkenly marking my territory.
