round-up: 2/15
& come see me at LA Zine Fest!
Happy Saturday!
Here’s what I have for you today:
Housekeeping
What I’m listening to
What I’m watching
What I’m reading
Quotations
Housekeeping:
I will be vending on the second day of LA Zine Fest on March 2 at The Broad. It’s on a Sunday, so parking will be free and easy Downtown. If you’ll be in the area, you can get free tickets to both Saturday and Sunday’s events here.
My newest hobby is making bookmarks out of old cereal boxes, so I will also be giving free bookmarks to anyone who stops by. Fun.
And, if you’re not in the area but are curious, I also sell zines on my website.
What I’m listening to:
What I’m watching:
Severance
Yellowjackets
Dexter
OITNB, again
What I’m reading:
Cactus Country, Zoe Bossiere (this was excellent; highly recommend)
Quotations:
What I often don’t say is the way I feel about my gender and its expression has changed many times before. That it continues to change, even as I speak.
-Zoe Bossiere
I don’t know how much of this memory is true. But we all grow up with anecdotes like these. Little stories that are supposed to explain how we became the people we are. Some, like mine, are passed down by our families. Others, we tell ourselves when we look back at pictures from our childhoods. We say things like, I was such a tomboy—see how I wrestled with my brothers? Or, I knew I was gay, even then—look at my tiny feet in those heels! We craft our origin stories, as much about who we were as who we want to be.
-Zoe Bossiere
When tensions with park staff were high, which was often, we retreated into the desert to build elaborate forts under gnarled ironwood branches and hunt jackrabbits with improvised slingshots. We ran alongside fast-moving trains, screaming and throwing rocks at their boxcars, chasing them like frightened animals out of our domain.
-Zoe Bossiere
We killed the beetles because we were angry. Because it was hot. Because we were bad. Because there was nothing else to do. Because we lived in trailers. Because the kids at school called us trash. Because our parents weren’t around to stop us. Because we weren’t enough for anyone. Because we didn’t like the faces we saw when we looked in the mirror. Because we lacked control over our lives. Because we had the power to decide which beetles would live and which would die. Because killing the beetles made us feel strong, if only for a little while.
-Zoe Bossiere
Each night I went home to the Airstream dusty, wounded, and utterly exhausted. I had thrown myself headlong into boyhood, and my body ached from the impact.
-Zoe Bossiere
That year, Sage and I continued playing a perpetual game of chicken at our sleepovers. She still won, but I was getting more brazen now, gazing into her eyes as she drew closer, closer, and turning away milliseconds before her lips could meet mine. Sometimes, she brushed my cheek—a near miss—and we’d giggle silently, careful not to wake her parents. We’d fall asleep hand in hand, our faces inches apart, breathing each other’s air.
-Zoe Bossiere
I leaned in. It was soft, electric, holy—a ghost of a kiss, so ephemeral I could scarcely believe it had happened at all. Until this moment, the intimacies between Sage and I had always remained insinuated, unspoken. Now, there was no turning back, and with this realization came an exhilaration and terror greater than any haunted house I’d ever dared to enter. I held this new secret tight in my chest like a breath.
-Zoe Bossiere
I knew I wouldn’t be able to look this way much longer. The bones in my once-round face had become sharper and more angular. My hips had widened, and my voice would never drop low like the voices of other boys my age. I was quickly growing into not-a-man, the anger I’d once felt about my changing body maturing into an emotion closer to grief.
-Zoe Bossiere
When someone perceived me as a girl, which was more and more often these days, the rules of boyhood I’d internalized when I came to Cactus Country suddenly didn’t seem to apply anymore. Behaviors that had been encouraged in me as a boy—stoicism, cynicism, machismo—instead made me seem cold, negative, difficult.
-Zoe Bossiere
We had sleepovers every weekend night, staying up late to get high and watch movies we never remembered in the morning. Locking the door to her room, we’d shed our shirts on the floor like snakeskins and cuddle under a thin sheet on her mattress, pressing all the softest parts of our bodies together. I never knew there were so many ways to kiss or be kissed. Lips and breath and tongue and teeth.
-Zoe Bossiere
I stopped caring how others perceived my gender, or didn’t; what happened to me next, or didn’t. Mostly, I wanted to disappear. For the person inside my body to become no one and my gender to become nothing. But despite my efforts to be invisible, without actively cultivating an androgynous appearance I looked more feminine than ever before.
-Zoe Bossiere
I didn’t desire the boys so much as I desired their desire; I wanted to chart the dimensions of their erotic imagination, to map it inversely onto mine.
-Zoe Bossiere
Despite her warnings, still I was drawn to the trains, to the romance of them and their promise of adventure. I loved the way we boys could feel a train coming long before we saw it, the rails tingling with an electric hum. How we’d rush out from the tunnels under the tracks as it charged toward us, closer and faster and louder until it roared past, the conductor blowing its long, sad horn with such volume you couldn’t hear yourself scream. And we screamed. We threw rocks against the boxcars, shoved each other to the ground, beat our chests until we were hoarse, until the train had consumed us in a rush of excitement unlike any other. It was an ecstatic, almost religious experience, to lose control in a force so much bigger and stronger than ourselves, a mechanical beast with the power to take life, to make life worth living. We lived for those damn trains.
-Zoe Bossiere
Of course, the specters of our past are always one or two steps behind us, patiently waiting for their chance to catch up, even take the lead.
-Zoe Bossiere
When I first left home, I believed those old ghosts were dead and tried to bury them. To live as though they did not haunt my present. But the farther I wandered from the desert, the longer I lived beyond its reach, the more those memories seemed to find their way above ground again.
-Zoe Bossiere
The boy I was does not know there are other children like him. He only knows his own body, his own desert. How to keep pace with the boys in the pack and how to blend into the brush under gnarled ironwood trees. The boy only knows how to survive. That’s all I’ve ever known how to do.
-Zoe Bossiere
I may never know how to talk about my childhood in a way everyone understands, or how to perfectly describe what it feels like to live in a gender that’s always on the move.
-Zoe Bossiere
There are no problems with anything that I like. Everything I like is flawless. Question over.
Actual heaven…I wanted to say good sex, but I'm blushing to say that. But it's kind of, I mean it kind of like seriously, that's what people should be raising the bar on. Their expectations don't settle. You should not be settling for less than heaven there.
Even within queer circles, you still routinely see people using incredibly narrow and heteronormative definitions of sex that hinge upon penetration, and assume that orgasms are (or should be) the end goal for all people.
I think one of the biggest problems in how people conceive of diverse sexualities is by attempting to place all sex acts upon a single hierarchy from "extremely kinky" to "tame." Under this framework, activities like PIV and oral are viewed as neutral precursors to the racier and more extreme forms of sex that a person must "work themselves up" to -- and this obscures that those supposedly neutral sexual activities can be both incredibly exciting & fulfilling to some, and downright disturbing or traumatizing to others.
I am harmed by the presumption that activities like PIV, fingering, and oral are neutral sexual acts that are lower on the intensity spectrum than things like being slapped or choked.
I also find completely un-kinky sex in general to be profoundly alienating and triggering in most instances. If the sex I’m having does not include some kind of clear power dynamic to ground myself within, I dissociate from my body, become completely sexually unresponsive, and typically leave the encounter wanting to rage or fall into tears.
The cultural idea that soft, slow, penis-in-vagina sex and oral are things every sexually active being must love has contributed to many sexual partners pushing those sexual acts on me — and to me doubting myself for hating them, and lying still trying to draw some enjoyment from a thing that makes me miserable.
I say “no vanilla” on my cruising app profiles and during sexual negotiations because I’m trying to scare off anyone who believes in the Vanilla-to-Kinky Staircase Model, and make it clear to them that the activities they believe anybody must enjoy are in fact not neutral and do need to be discussed just like any other.
Every single time I set “no vanilla” as a limit, I am inviting other parties into a discussion about what sex even is, and challenging them to state their preferences explicitly rather than following society’s dominant flow from making out to touching genitals to sticking one inside another. Some people are not prepared to actually do this, and it spares me a lot of mistreatment to quickly scare them away.
I think that we all benefit from unpacking our assumptions surrounding what sex is or can be, and for many sexual assault survivors it is immensely healing to take all pre-written societal expectations surrounding sex off the table.
"Vanilla" sexual values and assumptions are the enemy of all sexual assault survivors, because they are so coercive as to never be discussed. You don't have to be interested in any remotely freaky shit in order to benefit from us all collectively destroying the notion that certain forms of sex are the default that we owe to people. We ALL benefit from being able to reject the sex acts we do not like as loudly and proudly as we want. We have all got to start speaking frankly about these things in our sexual negotiations, and ripping the planks off the Vanilla-to-Kinky Staircase, so that we might build the sexual lives that we actually want.
If being gay teaches you anything, it’s that nothing about love is prefab. No couple’s narrative plays out exactly like another’s, and no holiday should kneel to a checklist of romantic imperatives, especially ones flocked in red plush. If love doesn’t come with permission—or an invitation—to tell tradition to fuck off, well: Maybe it isn’t love.
Tonight the air is cold and smells like winter.
Ashes fall around me like pieces of the moon.
People are sometimes too interested in “what happened”—the plod of plot and action. Sometimes the rest of the story, or perhaps the heart of the story, is carried by image, repetition, tiny intensities not captured fully from plot and action. A very intense drama played out in my relationship with Devin. You will not find it on these pages. The drama is not the story, or, the story of why and how relationships dissolve or crescendo is every story, living inside all of us to differing degrees, rising and falling in waves. When I focus on moments, on small intensities that may or may not interest anyone else, I’m reminding us how those tiny pieces of a life are sometimes carrying bigger meanings than the big, dull, thunderous calamities that befall us all.
If I track not just plot and action, but impressions, emotional intensities, associations, repetitions, images, can I transmogrify and reframe the story?
I understand now that love is always the fall.
That’s all for today—
-Despy Boutris
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