HOLESOME COMMUNITY
Last month, I performed in Amina Cruz’s solo show, SPIT, at Coaxial Arts as a glory hole. Most of my body was in privacy, behind a wall that had been measured and fitted around my bent over bottom. Just my feet and my nether parts extruded the custom wood structure. The exposure was not an issue for me, but the boredom soon became reminiscent of my time in college as a figure model for art classes. I occupied myself using the old trick to circulate my blood to my lifted feet using my mind. Deeper into the exhibition were little booths with silkscreened rolls of paper towels, lube, and individuals screens playing low-fi recording of queer sex.
Then three leather clad figures entered the space— one half of my leather family, which is centered around our Rope Top who ties all of us individually, my emergency contact, Captain. Going into this installation/art piece, I had told Captain that our folks could do anything they wanted to me, but could they please keep watch over me so nothing unsavory (I’m a stickler for sanitariness) happened? The creative choice they made was to cane me for nearly forty five minutes. They set up a system in which I could communicate via foot motions, asking each time for more by flopping my feet up and down. Crossing my feet, which I never did except when they said, “show me No,” meant stop. As the impact awakened my bits, (a brilliant choice to avoid the obvious and bring creativity to the glory hole trope) I totally forgot my boredom and any discomfort from earlier. I was completely present to the unscripted communal show.
The day before SPIT, as part of the Queer Storytellers series at Stories, I had shared with the audience about my four year long love affair with the game of rugby and together we built a scrum - a group of eight people fitting together to form a single fist-like pushing unit used to gain ground on the field during the game. I coached these literary audience members into their tight positions squished and held by each other in the parking lot after the event. Experiencing these two highlights of creative and communal engagement back to back, was a high point for me. Nontraditional kinship bonds built upon extreme physical or creative acts are the central core of what I call my “community.”
Our bodies need each other. But romance and sex alone, as it has been minimized and sold to us via Hollywood, is not enough. “We come into this world expecting to be raised by a village,” said Lizanne Deliz, a recent guest on Fuck Yeah, a pleasure education podcast based here in LA. “And when we don’t get that, we have a lot of grief.”
This society profits from our isolation, disassociation and addiction. So bonds have been severed, attention spans have been shortened, and community has been reduced to a demographic descriptor, rather than something felt in the bones.
Flashback to September, when I am going to the airport to pick up up the musician LeCiel who is slated to perform at The Lovers premiere. The worst ring of hell is the LAX pickup loop. I am so tired. I have been circling in bumper to bumper traffic for an hour. I feel my mind wish to be anywhere else, and begin to glide into future projections…. but I catch myself leaving and instead take a deep breath and open the moon roof. The rush of airport noise and nippy air floods me with the excitement of the crowds landing in a foreign country. I start to sink into the realization that this is the only time I get to pick up my dear friend for this momentous occasion. This moment will never happen again. Now, the brake lights on the car in front of me sparkles.
At a new moon bonfire, I sit in the dark sand with two friends and a dog. One of them, my ex, explains the connection they’ve noticed between romantic fantasy and addiction. They recently caught themself, in the midst of a vacation with family, craving to be consumed by the thoughts of their current crush. Even in a beautiful place, the pull of mental escape was so strong, that they found themself bargaining in their head, let me imagine for just fifteen minutes.
Wanting another is such an alluring impossibility, one can feel drunk on it. Since you cannot ever, really, have them, it is an empty promise of a solution. And while I think possession/possessiveness is fun in kink and play, it is terribly painful in real life.
“Can you tell me I’m the only one? Only one? Only one?” sings the fluttery vocalist of Wet, which this same ex had put on a mix for me, their smile spreading cheshire cat like when I called them out on it. Of course I cannot tell them their the only one. But it feels so good, even perverse, to acknowledge the desire to be. Wishing, or flirting with another reality, as my sister writes in her forthcoming book about DESIRE, is sometimes a useful indicator of something else. Connection is a human need. But focusing on the fantasy of possession paradoxically keeps us in our own heads, disconnected.
A comrade / lover who splits her time between the east coast and LA stopped me when I called her visit a “vacation.” She’s wary to use the word or mindset of “vacation” because relaxation, play and hustle have equal importance as aspects of her life's work.
I love this, as I too have the urge to merge all types of time into just being. Fuck the “work/ life balance” in favor of the work of living. Sometimes being is spreadsheets and sometimes its floating face up in a pool, either way PRESENCE remains the goal.
“A hole is not nothing” was a phrase I was fond of in grad school. I think similar to the compulsion to vacate uncomfortable moments, is a societal ache to fill holes, plug openings, and repair cracks. The myth of two, of a romantic love that will complete you, relies on the human’s need for connection to power a futile chase which is a great distraction from the community that might be close at hand.
Sitting in traffic or around a fire, explaining your longing is a way of celebrating the open spaces in our time, our hearts, our anuses, and our friends that enliven us to the beauty of the moment, as is, unfilled.