and now for something completely different.

In my intro post I mentioned that i had been meaning to create this blog for years and would remember everytime i began trying to establish a new lovership. The idea being that if i just WROTE what it was i wanted, what i liked, what i expected, then i would save myself a lot of repetition, and the other person would have a lot of information with which to decide if they wanted to engage with me further or not. Originally I envisioned that what i would write would be about sex, this being a lovership and all...my preference in all things sexual. So it's a bit.. unexpected that I am writing the first actual entry and the realization is that lo and behold...sex, and all its attendant STUFF, is not the priority.

Something has happened. Not suddenly... just a slow coming to the surface of what actually is important to me. To the surface of my own awareness and so by extension to my relationships.

So settle in.. make yourself comfortable.
Let me tell you a story...

ABOUT THIS SITE

The Men Of The Bordello is an idea that keeps reasserting itself whenever I am negotiating loverships with str8 men.

I myself am not straight. I have attempted the beginnings of such lovership negotiations with a woman, a transman and a transwoman. I expect I will continue to do so. I have a perpetual hard-on for black men, who to any degree aren't straight. But I have a definition of “queer” that I so far don’t live up to: I have aligned myself thus far with heteronormality when I have sat silently through homophobic conversations, only rolling my eyes. I have not been brave on the regular. I have not positioned myself, publicly and often, as I actually am, a woman who is a fan of the idea of fluid attraction across (fluid) gender. But practically? Practically I have not been an ally to men and women who are out and queer. As long as I continue to let straight people assume that we are on the same page because it’s more comfortable for me not to engage conversations that expose me to their homophobia and to my homophobia, then I can’t very well call myself queer. According to me.
So I won’t.

I’m not straight.
There’s a lot more I need to figure out
This site is a place where I work out who I am and what I believe is worth fighting for.
It’s me getting in touch with and re-learning how to express some long-lost feelings: joy and pleasure specifically, through means that are entirely unknown to me: open and public and honest and transparent communication.

It's me getting out of my head and onto paper the distance between what I feel on the inside and what I do /say to the world outside of myself. I want to make the two one.
The Men of the Bordello is me getting out of my head and unto the page the friction I experience between my desire to be sexually expressive and the anti-sex, anti-pleasure, anti-body, anti-woman's body propaganda I've been indoctrinated with since birth. I mean to remove the weight of conflict off my cunt when I'd rather be cumming, thanks, and have it out here, on this blog.

This is the place I let my sexuality join the rest of me.
This is new.

This pointed awareness of how cramped I am within my own head and heart and cunt comes out of my participation in The Azania Alliance. I use the word participation carefully because my presence in this community of thinkers, facilitator and fellow artists was defined by my refusal to participate. But I was there. Fully. I am aware that I conveyed my disconnect more than I conveyed the degree to which our engagements impacted me.
My growth into an adulthood I can be proud of comes throught the fire of Azania.
This blog- my ability to even open my mouth to say I think I need to open my mouth- comes out of the risks Azania community members took to expose their own life struggles and the efforts invested in trying to encourage me to take a good long look at mine.
I refused and resisted and did a full system shutdown that contributed to the demise of Azania.
As a working end product Azania was a failure. It is not the thriving, intentional, resource-sharing community it was intended to be. As an ongoing, life-changing process Azania is a success. In my own life, the questions continue, the challenges remain, the level of concientizing set a bar within me that when it is absent I experience an almost physical discomfort.
It is often absent.
Transparency in communication is not the norm.
Azania was not the norm.



The title Men of the Bordello is a triple entendre. It references my oldest pet fantasies of oodles of tan, racially ambiguous, sexually prepped men at my fingertips, a harem/ queen-with-consorts fantasy that comes to me courtesy of the colonialist sexual repression/ white supremacy Combo Special.


More recently the Bordello references the name Dark Daughta gave her boudoir while we lived in Azania. It could have been (and would have been for me had I not been in the midst of total personal upheaval/shutdown) a site, for all of us, to consider creating a lived politic that included how we fuck. I was non-communicative and withdrawn at the time but now that I have generated a desire to live for real, the questions Dark Daughta and Seminal Son asked in 2006 are signposts as I try to work this living for real out. The links to their blog writings are on this page. Their blogs are LIVE. Run, don't walk.


Their questions seeded this blog:
What is my relationship to men?
To my father?
What would it mean to "stand by" my lovers, these men I say I want, instead of berating them for their patriarchal bullshit and/or try to pass them off as “too much work”, hoping stronger wimmen...or my community... or a random stranger... someone! anyone! but me! would engage them in a transformative way.

This is my strategy: jumping into this struggle heart first. With men I care about. I will not pass them off to someone else, or to the unfolding of the universe or anything. I’m engaging the patriarchs with my walls down. I am going to get up in there and tangle with all the love and all the loathing I have for them. For us.

I’m engaging the patriarchy as it manifests within myself. I am patriarchy’s glorious creation: the patriarchal woman, conflicted and cramped, oppressed and oppressive.


It’s a maudit bordel but I’m excited about the challenges. I’m excited to have finally agreed to take myself on, come what may. This is the fight I should have been having with myself, instead of attacking those who pointed out the things that were confining me and hurting them.

This work is lively. Yes, it means exposure, but I’m willing to take that on now. The energy it takes to stay withdrawn and silent for fear of being noticed has been siphoned from my creative juices. I need that energy back to grow my dreams.
I thought and was taught that “Respectable, Appropriate and Contained” would keep me safe- part of the unremarkable crowd. As I far as I gathered, being seen was dangerous. I feared it opened me to attack.

I write this blog now because no outside attack can damage me the way my own gnawing at myself in silence and self-isolation has. My silence has not protected me, it has just sealed me into a small room with all the self-hatred I've picked up along the way. My self-exile only amplified my pain and, as long as I continued, I consistently hurt the people who tried to come in close,to support and love me.
I’m done being trapped.
I want to love better.
I'm ready to love better.

So this is it. The Men of The Bordello The oiled pileup of angry, hurt, desiring bodies that are myself and my lovers. There will be howling pleasure and bloodletting here. Mine, maybe yours if you’re game. In full transparency. In full view. Saying I want to fuck you and I want to fuck the system we're in. Are you in?
Welcome to you if you are. I’m out of a life-long hermitage and I appreciate the company.
Let's see what happens.