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Menstuff® has compiled information and books on the
issue of Sexuality. This column is
written by long-term activist David Steinberg. David is a
photographer, author, editor, and publisher. His previous
books include Photo
Sex: Fine art sexual photography comes of age;
Erotic
by Nature: A Celebration of Life, of Love, and of Our
Wonderful Bodies, The
Erotic Impulse: Honoring the Sensual Self and his
most recent book Divas
of San Francisco: Portraits of transsexual
women. He is currently working on two
books of couples photography, This Thing We Call Sex,
and Sex and Disability. He lives in San Francisco. If
you would like to receive Comes Naturally and other
writing by David Steinberg regularly via email (free and
confidential), send your name and email address to David at
eronat@aol.com. Past
columns are available at the Society for Human Sexuality's
"David Steinberg Archives": www.sexuality.org/davids.html
A Different
America Well, it's all over but the shouting, but in case you haven't heard, May has been National Masturbation Month. Indeed, May 2005 marks National Masturbation Month's tenth anniversary, which is to say it's become something of a national institution. In this young, ever-reinventing-itself country of ours, where history is measured in weeks instead of centuries, and three-month-old news events have already dropped out of national consciousness and politics, something that's going strong after ten years is a force to be reckoned with. National Masturbation Month was proclaimed in May 1995 by the folks at Good Vibrations. Good Vibrations is San Francisco's pioneering sex-education and women-friendly sex-product emporium. In the spring of 1995, Surgeon-General Joycelyn Elders had just been fired by otherwise generally sex-friendly President Bill Clinton (remember Bill Clinton?) because Dr. Elders had said, in public, that teaching adolescents about the joys of masturbation might be a good idea in the safe sex era. Somehow that was enough, all by itself, to cost her her job. And that's when the Democrats were running things. Good Vibrations decided that if promoting masturbation had become sufficient cause to be banished from Washington politics, then it was time for some masturbation advocacy, specifically to "raise awareness and highlight the importance" of masturbation, of self-pleasuring, of solo sex, of jacking off. (For a list of no fewer than one thousand terms for masturbation, check out www.masturbationlist.com.) It's either odd or completely to be expected (you decide which) that a sexual act which is arguably the most common of all sexual acts is also an act that is hidden, lied about, and twisted into a mere shadow of being everything it could be, under the weight of a nearly universal blanket of shame and embarrassment. What started out as an amusing, celebratory semi-political jaunt -- and , perhaps a clever marketing angle as well -- has taken wings over the last ten years and become something of a countercultural tradition and observance, with increasing tendrils into mainstream culture as well. This morning, a Google search for National Masturbation Month produced no fewer than 48,500 postings. This year, New York's Toys in Babeland sex store kicked off Masturbation Month by convening what is called a "National Summit Press Conference" on masturbation, May 4th. National Masturbation Day came three days later (May 7th), proclaimed by sex pioneer Betty Dodson (author of the groundbreaking 1974 book, "Liberating Masturbation," later republished as "Sex for One"). Masturbate-A-Thon's (fund-raising events for which people solicit pledges of contributions to sex-related charities for every minute they masturbate, either at home or at a special masturbation party thrown for just that purpose) were held this year not only in San Francisco (on May 28th, San Francisco's seventh such event -- www.masturbate-a-thon.com), but also in Portland, Oregon, on May 14th (www.masturbate-a-thon.com), and in Toronto, Ontario, on May 28th (www.comeasyouare.com/masturbate) -- making the Masturbate-A-Thon an international vent for the first time. Not to be outdone, Seattle held its own "JO-Palooza," also a group (though not fund-raising) celebration of masturbation via mass participation on May 22nd. Lest you think that celebrating masturbation for a month, or coming together in large groups for communal masturbation rituals is only for the fringe of heart, take note that during last year's Masturbate-A-Thon in San Francisco, no fewer than 1700 people participated by turning in pledge forms and checks (though only a fraction of that number attended the central group event). The fund-raiser came up with close to $5,000 for San Francisco's fledgling Center for Sex and Culture. Records were set and records were kept, as befits a sex-cultural center, perhaps with an eye to goading greater-than-ever exuberance from this year's Masturbate-A-Thon participants. (Longest time masturbating: 6 hours, 32 minutes. Most money raised by one individual: $1,000. Most documented orgasms: 36.) Now there's even an article (www.vgg.com/tp/tp_053101_nmm.html) online decrying the "crass commercialization" of National Masturbation Month, meaning the use of same to sell increasingly complicated and expensive sex gadgets, in place of what author T. Mike esteems as the traditional, tried-and-true, organic, and expense-free mainstays of "my imagination and my trusty right hand." "The decorations go up earlier and earlier every year [at] my cosy local mom 'n' pop sex shop," complains T. Mike. What is the world coming to, he laments, when National Masturbation Month has been reduced to what he calls a "hollow sham and a mockery." Ten years of history, and now a plump target for commercial exploitation! National Masturbation Month has truly arrived. In America, you know you're culturally relevant when you've got enough market share to become worthy of corporate co-optation. First Gay Pride, now National Masturbation Month. Of course, it's true that being promoted by stores the likes of Good Vibrations and Toys in Babeland is not the same thing as being sponsored by Toyota. But now that National Masturbation Month is being promulgated by virtually every politically-conscious sex-positive boutique from coast to international coast, can the influx of corporate logos from Bud Light, Phillip Morris, Hitachi, and Liquid Silk be far behind? There are people who, in the process of redeeming masturbation from the junk heap of "losers' sex," are inclined to raise it to the level of the ultimate sexual experience. Good Vibrations sells t-shirts that read, "If you want something done right, do it yourself," and I've often heard it argued that skillful masturbation can produce more intense and more satisfying orgasms than partner sex can ever hope to match. As much as I stand ready to mount the barricades that would liberate masturbation from centuries of embarrassment and shame -- as much as I enjoy elaborate solo sex sessions that slowly build to truly powerful ecstatic orgasmic releases -- as much as I have always masturbated regularly, whether I had an ongoing sexual partner or not -- still, I have to say that, when it comes to ultimate sexual experiences, my mind (and body, and, dare I say, soul) have a way of turning to something other than masturbation, something that goes beyond myself into the world of interpersonal connectivity. I like a good orgasm as much as anyone else, but for me, the heart of the sexual matter is not about achieving reliable and powerful orgasms, but about mixing something down deep inside me with something down deep inside someone else, about interpersonal intimacy, about transcending the boundaries of self. So maybe it's not surprising that, when I sat down to make a list of personal masturbatory experiences worth writing about in a column -- masturbation events that stand out from every day, business-as-usual fare -- what kept coming to mind were experiences that involved other people, one way or another. I don't remember the first time I masturbated. I don't even remember the first time I ejaculated. I forgive myself the first bit of forgetfulness, especially since I have reason to believe that I masturbated regularly as an infant, as a way of dealing with starvation panic. But the second memory lapse strikes me as both strange and disturbing. I've heard all kinds of stories from other men (more often frightening than pleasurable for people who grew up in relative sexual ignorance) about first ejaculation surprises. You'd certainly think a person would remember something as dramatic as liquid spurting unexpectedly from his penis. But for the life of me, I have no memory whatsoever of that coming-of-age event, the boy's equivalent of first menstruation, my physiological emergence into the possibility of propagating the species. The earliest masturbation routine I remember involved kneeling by the side of my bed (a posture that other kids used to say their prayers, I suppose) and playing with myself while looking at sexy pictures of busty movie stars in tight angora sweaters. (I know I'm dating myself here, but you'll have to do your own math.) There were a host of tacky little magazines published back then, truly miniature in size (maybe five inches high and three inches wide), with titillating stories about movie stars and other celebrities, and even more titillating pictures of the sex sirens of the day. The magazines were called things like Pix and Vue, and they wouldn't raise an eyebrow even among the Religious Right these days, but each era has its own boundary where things get risqué, and these magazines were on the edge of mine. I would steal them from the corner store because I was too young to buy magazines with sexy pictures (I would have been too embarrassed to buy them, even if Mrs. Meyer would have sold them to me, which she wouldn't have), and these were the only ones I could easily stuff into my pockets. I'm not sure how old I was. Maybe ten. I'm sorry to say that I don't remember any particularly noteworthy masturbational events while I was growing up. Nothing particularly ecstatic, nothing particularly humiliating. (My dad would always whistle as he was walking up the stairs, toward my room, so that I would have time to conceal anything I didn't want him to see.) No circle jerks, no masturbating in front of other people, no seeing other people masturbate. (I'm taking masturbation to be what my dictionary says it is -- sex you do by and to yourself, rather than the other meaning that some people give it -- sex you do with your hand. In my book, "mutual masturbation," while a distinctly pleasurable activity, is also simply a contradiction in terms....) For me, masturbation was ubiquitous, to be sure, but hardly inspiring of poetry. There was lots of masturbating to porn. Masturbating silently in college so as not to wake up my roommates. Masturbating while driving -- enjoying the discipline of controlled surrender, giving myself over to orgasms (even big orgasms) while paying attention to keeping the car on the road, and not weaving enough to get pulled over by some cop. ("I'm not drunk, officer, I was just masturbating.") Is it illegal to masturbate while driving, if you keep your seat belt on? The masturbation memories I have that are most interesting to me all seem to involve masturbating in front of other people, or watching other people masturbate -- something I got to do frequently later in my life at sex parties of various stripes. In my mid-thirties I encountered swingers parties for the first time -- parties where people got together in groups for the explicit purpose of having sex with people who were not their primary partners. Masturbation at mainstream swingers parties, however, at least at the parties that I discovered in my early swinger days, was generally quite subdued, at least for men. People were either having sex or watching people have sex, but not doing both at the same time. Watching and playing with yourself just didn't seem to happen very much, which carried the implicit message, typical for masturbation, that it was vaguely, if unspokenly, an uncool thing to do, or to do openly. But then the magnificent Jack-and-Jill-Off parties came to San Francisco, bringing with them a completely different sexual culture and a whole new set of sexual rules and norms. The pansexual Jack-and-Jill-Off parties grew out of masturbation parties sponsored by the San Francisco Jacks, a group of gay men who wanted to eroticize safe sex at a time when AIDS awareness was first coming to the surface. At Jacks parties, groups of gay men came together to masturbate -- themselves and each other (contradictions in terms be damned) -- and the word was out around town that the whole thing was extremely hot. Women and heterosexual men who wanted to come and just watch were politely turned away. Eventually David Talbot (founder and editor-in-chief of Salon Magazine), Jerry Zientara, and a small group of friends, decided to organize the "World's First Jack-&-Jill-Off Party," a truly revolutionary event which came to pass on November 7, 1987. The party, attended by about 150 people encompassing a broad array of genders and sexual orientations, was a smashing success. Unprotected sex was strictly outlawed (monitors circulated to ensure compliance) and, much more significantly in terms of inspiring sexual creativity, intercourse of any kind, vaginal or anal, even with latex protection, was also forbidden. No intercourse?!? What were people to do??? Denied the straight and narrow road to the same-old-same-old, people were forced to use their imaginations. "Just imagine a party of women and men using their heads as well as their hands to reinvent sex! Making whoopee while making history!" declared the invitation to the World's First Jack-and-Jill-Off Party. The result was the explosion of what JJO promoter Jerry Zientara brilliantly and accurately has described as a psychosexual laboratory of sexual invention -- a culture of sexual experimentation that managed to span, blur, and in many cases entirely obliterate previously sacrosanct distinctions of sexual orientations, tastes, practices, and preferences. "We made whoopee! We made history! At the world's first J&J party hot Jills and sexy Jacks came together using imagination, minds and hands to prove that safe sex can make the earth move!" exulted Zientara's invitation, three months later, to the sequel Jack-and-Jill-Off Party, "The Second Cumming," a party that turned out to be even larger, even more imaginative, and even more fun than the first. To the delight and sexual edification of hundreds of grateful people, myself included, a long succession of JJO parties followed, becoming a significant feature of San Francisco's multifaceted sexual scene through 1995. At the Jack-and-Jill-Off parties, masturbation was not only respected without reservation, but was revered as a truly first-rate sexual activity of preference. As a result, couple or group sexual activity took place, more often than not, surrounded by rings of intense observers, many or most masturbating openly with great enthusiasm. Among other things, the openness about masturbation provided an opportunity for people of all sexual persuasions and orientations to experiment with new sexual roles and personas that they might have been much more reluctant to enter into with a partner. I remember watching a close gay male friend avidly masturbating while attentively watching two women who were engrossed in heated sex on a mattress at his feet. He explained that he wanted to see if he could get excited by women, by watching women being sexual, something he had never tried before. (It turned out that he could, indeed.) Many men who steadfastly identified as heterosexual nevertheless experimented with jerking off while watching pairs or groups of men being sexual. For many of these men, it was a significant step in overcoming their own homophobia. For more than a few, this became a first step toward opening to more direct sexual contact with other men. (At the other end of the homophobia spectrum, men whose homophobia was decidedly more entrenched could be seen at every party, discreetly wending their ways to the door early in the evening.) So what are the experiences that stand out for me personally? I remember one very glamorous, dramatic woman, obviously enjoying being the center of attention of a large circle of men, all masturbating, while she danced and moved seductively among them, sometimes turning her attention to one or another of the men, sometimes to the whole group. The scene culminated with the men hoisting the woman off the floor entirely, suspending her in the center of the tight circle of male bodies with one hand, while masturbating with the other until all the men had ejaculated onto her belly, to the cheers and laughter of everyone, especially the glistening epicenter of the scene. I remember another time, when I was masturbating rather absent-mindedly, leaning up against the wall while watching a couple, maybe several couples, maybe a group of people, having sex on mattresses in the center of the floor. At one point I became aware of a woman on the opposite side of the room, also leaning up against the wall, also masturbating. At first we were both watching the people in the center of the room, but after a while we caught into each other's eyes, and before long we were masturbating directly to each other. Gradually, the energy grew, and eventually we both came, exchanging warm smiles but without ever saying a word,. There was another, somewhat similar, encounter, that I remember as being exceptionally powerful, also at a sex party. I was watching a couple playing with each other in a casual, light-hearted way, the two of them standing against a wall in a large roomful of people with lots of different couples and groups being sexual in various ways. The man stood behind the woman, both of them facing outward, and I loved watching while he played with her breasts, her legs, her belly, her pussy, the two of them gradually getting more and more excited. Not wanting to intrude, I kept my distance, masturbating quietly, as if my masturbation had nothing to do with them. Eventually the woman noticed me, then looked away, noticed me again, looked away again. Each time we made eye contact, I felt permission to move a little closer to them, until I was standing right in front of them, masturbating more and more vigorously as they got more and more excited themselves. They clearly enjoyed being watched, but said nothing to me, made no overt recognition that I was there at all, certainly made no invitation for me to join them. If it weren't for the fact that I was standing only about two feet in front of them, I might have thought they hadn't noticed me at all. The unspoken agreement was that I could watch and masturbate as much as I wanted, as long as there was no physical contact between them and me, which is how we continued until both the woman and I came. (Maybe the man came too; I really don't remember.) Afterwards, we all smiled, more to ourselves than to each other. No one said anything to acknowledge the connection we had just had. I wandered off, thoroughly delighted, and never saw them again. There are others, but these are the stories that come to mind. I'm sure that everyone who reads this has dozens of masturbation stories too -- pleasurable stories, painful stories, mundane stories, exotic stories. Hopefully you have someone you can (or could) tell your masturbation stories to -- a partner, a lover, a family member, a friend. Maybe that's something to add to the mix in May, 2006,
when National Masturbation Month will come again -- a
gathering of appreciative friends, a time and place for
people to come together, sip good wine, eat good cheese, sit
around the fireplace, tell a bunch of their long-unspoken,
long-neglected masturbation stories, and affirm together the
goodness of sexual pleasure in all its forms. Jamison Green, Sex, Gender and the
Question of What it means to be a Real Man I first met Jamison Green at a party in San Francisco. I was introduced to him by my good friend, journalist Marcy Sheiner. Marcy had interviewed Jamison a year or so earlier for a feature story she was writing. The two of them were so taken with each other that they had quickly moved into a powerful primary relationship that would last for seven years. I could see immediately why Marcy was so taken with Jamison. He was attractive, soulful, and perceptive, with quiet, watchful eyes, a playful smile, and a relaxed social manner that projected an appealing mix of confidence and vulnerability. He and I both had roots in the then-thriving California pro-feminist men's movement, and we made a strong and immediate connection with each other, comparing notes on the ins and outs of moving beyond mainstream perceptions of male roles and masculinity. Within an hour we managed to tell each other how we felt about everything from being devoted fathers to the dilemmas of being distinctly shorter than the average guy, from relationship quandries to feminist politics, from the importance of building community with like-minded men to what mattered most to each of us about sex. Because Marcy had told me the story of how she and Jamison met before I met him in person, I never had the experience of knowing Jamison without also knowing that he was transgendered. I certainly never would have guessed any such thing had I not been told. Even with the cognitive information that Jamison had spent the first forty years of his life in a female body, and even though we were quickly talking about personal issues that related directly to his being transgendered, talking with Jamison felt very much like talking to many of my other male friends. Indeed, what struck me most about Jamison was not how different he was from me, but how much the two of us were alike: Two men sorting out what it means to be male in this particular society at this particular point in history. Two men trying to understand who we most genuinely are, and who we most deeply want to be, as men. Two men trying to resolve the conflicts from having notions of masculinity that clashed with so much of what we had ingested from the world around us about men, masculinity, and male gender roles. Most significantly, I think, I felt comradeship with Jamison because we shared a firm belief that it was profoundly important for people to remain true to their innermost sense of self and personhood, even when such fierce insistence on personal integrity threatens being misunderstood, condemned, marginalized, isolated, and even punished -- by loved ones, family, friends, and more distant acquaintances, not to mention society at large. It was only gradually that I came to understand how important a person Jamison was in the then-emerging movement for female-to-male (FTM) transgender visibility, public understanding, and political equality. For years, Jamison was president of the largest and most influential FTM organization, FTM International, broadening that organization's outreach and ability to provide a broad range of resources to transgendered people throughout the U.S. and the world. As long as I've known him, Jamison has traveled the world (continuously, it seems to me, though I know he has also managed to fulfill the duties of a full-time day job and maintained important relationships with his partner -- now wife -- and daughter), speaking about transgender issues and being a political advocate for transgender rights. At his 50th birthday celebration several years ago, I came to understand how influential a person could be in other people's lives as was moved as one person after another spoke of how Jamison had impacted their lives. Several people said quietly that, were it not for Jamison, they doubted whether they would still be alive. Now Jamison has published his first book, Becoming a Visible Man -- a thoughtful, powerful, moving work that addresses the issues of gender, personal choice, self-validation, and political action on a broad range of different levels. Most fundamentally, perhaps, Becoming a Visible Man is an immediate and personal account of Jamison's personal odyssey through the tangles of gender roles and gender identity, the story of how he came to understand that he was not a tomboy, not a lesbian, but actually a man who happened to be living in a woman's body. But Becoming a Visible Man is much more than just an account of one person's gender identity journey. It is also a perceptive, complex analysis of how gender identity and gender expectations function in society, and an opportunity for Jamison to discuss his philosophy and political perspective about what it means to be a man, about sexuality, about dealing with family conflicts, about how best to work for political and social change, about the dance of staying true to oneself while being buffeted by the expectations and emotions of the people most near and dear to us. Jamison takes his readers through this wide spectrum of issues with a combination of insight, emotional vulnerability, and remarkable compassion for the difficulties that non-transgendered people face when trying to understand such a basic challenge to what most of us grew up believing was a simple, bipolar, either-or, male or female universe. It's appropriate that Becoming a Visible Man is all at once a transgender history, political manual, biomedical textbook, interpersonal relationships guide, and philosophy treatise. Stepping outside of societal gender norms is a fundamental act of civil disobedience, such a challenge to conventional notions of how people and society are (and should be) constructed. Coming to the realization that your body and your inner sense of gender do not coincide, and deciding to act to bring those two parts of yourself into congruence, requires a person to question him/herself, life, relationships, and society at the deepest levels. Stepping outside assumed notions of how things are supposed to be also gives a person the opportunity to see both themselves and the world around them with unique clarity and perspective. Happily, Jamison Green has been able to use his personal history to arrive at complex, thoughtful perspectives on the variety of issues raised by sexual mutability, and he is able to write about those issues in ways that can be enlightening to people both within and outside the transgender community. A few samples, from Becoming a Visible Man: On the nature of arriving at a clear notion of one's gender: "A gender quest is... a kind of spiritual quest. It is our willful destiny to find that balance, that strength, that peace and logic of the soul, that underlies the agony, the frustration, the desperation and anxiety of living on this earthly plane." On the use of gender as a tool of social control: "Somebody's got us by the balls and they don't want to let go. Who is that somebody? Who is so afraid of losing control? Of what are they going to lose control if people are allowed to freely express their gender(s)? What is preserved by denying the legitimacy of transsexual and transgendered people? What is destroyed if we are acknowledged?... Are we really so unsure of our gender identities that we think everyone would want to change their sex if they could?" On the myth that transsexual people want to change their gender: "I am a man who lived forty years in a female body. But I was not a woman. I am not a woman who became man. I am not a woman who lives as a man. I am not nor was I ever a woman, though I lived in a female body, and certainly tried, whenever I felt up to it, to be a woman. But it was never in me to be a woman." On what it means to be a man: "What makes a man a man? His penis? His beard? His receding hairline? His lack of breasts? His sense of himself as a man? Some men have no beard, some have no penis, some never lose their hair, some have breasts; all have a sense of themselves as men.... Transsexual men may appear feminine, androgynous or masculine. Any man may appear feminine, androgynous or masculine.... The crux of the matter of gender for anyone is their own visibility and sufficient external confirmation of their gender identity." On sex and masculinity: "I relish my erections and crave release from them the same as any other man. But it is not a penis that makes me (or anyone else who has one) a man.... Without [a penis], a man would still be a man. With it, if he's lucky, he's a man who can urinate in a standing position, deposit sperm close to a cervix, and enjoy orgasm -- important activities, no doubt, but there are other ways to do all of those important things. These are not the requirements for being a man." On the relationship between the movement for transgender rights and the movements for equality of all sexual orientations: "The inclusion of transgendered and transsexual people in the civil rights efforts of all the national gay and lesbian groups in only a few years, and the willingness of these groups to realize that the discrimination against them extends beyond the bedroom and beyond their sexual object of choice is a significant evolutionary achievement that will continue to transform the way society on the whole things about sexuality and about difference." On the emotional risks, and possibilities, of being a gender outlaw: "Loneliness is the mark of difference. Breaking gender boundaries can make us into proud rebels, defiant contraries, or rugged individualists for whom loneliness is an emblem of courage and determination.... Once people can look beyond surfaces, once they learn to see the qualities that make us who we are... it's possible to let go of preconceptions and see valuable human beings." On the importance of being true to oneself: "Being true to oneself creates the integrity and self-respect we need to have if we are to extend that respect to others.... If society can learn to incorporate and value transpeople in all their variation, most if not all of the other social problems that arise from intolerance and mininformation may be manageable [as well]." The issues raised by transgender people are important, not just because it's important to extend equal rights and respectability to all people, but also because the questions raised by the possibilities of gender mutability are relevant to all of us, even those of us whose bodies coincide nicely with our internal sense of gender. Growing transgender visibility and political activity gives us all a chance to notice how deeply and powerfully we turn to bi-polar gender distinction as a way of ordering our world and our relationships. Even more fundamentally, transgendered people can be way-showers to all of us about the importance of maintaining personal integrity in a world that asks us to compromise core aspects of ourselves in the name of everything from sexual morality to financial success, from social acceptance to familial approval. Becoming a Visible Man is a wonderful, thoughtful,
and complex exploration of all these issues -- an important
read for transgendered and traditionally gendered people
alike. (Becoming a Visible Man, by Jamison Green, Vanderbilt
University Press, 2004, 222 pages, ISBN 0-8265-1456-1,
$24.95.) Sex Worker
Self-Determination: The Lusty Lady Workers' Coop After
One Year Being part of a worker-owned, democratically-run business collective is an empowering, freeing, liberating, even revolutionary experience. It's also emotionally complicated, time consuming, psychologically confusing, interpersonally demanding, and a lot of just plain hard work. Especially if the people in your collective are exceptionally headstrong, independently-minded, rebellious, suspicious of authority, and generally opposed to rules and regulations. Especially if the business of the collective involves taking off your clothes and displaying your naked body for the sexual gratification of your customers. Just ask the women (and the support staff men) who work at San Francisco's Lusty Lady peep show theatre -- the nation's one and only cooperatively-run, worker-owned, democratically-governed sex entertainment enterprise. On June 1, 2003, the workers at the Lusty Lady bought the theatre they had been working at and set up their collective. After a year as their own bosses, the Lusty dancers are alive and kicking, one-fifth of the way through their purchase payments, and still full of spirit, determination, and fierce independence. But they are also distinctly sobered by the nuts-and-bolts details of running their own sexually-charged show, and the complexities of building a culture of community within the highly individualized, nobody's going-to-tell-me-what-to-do sex work subculture. Perhaps you know about the Lusty Lady Theatre from your own erotic wanderings. Perhaps you know about it from Julia Query's award-winning documentary, "Live Nude Girls Unite!" For the benefit of the uninitiated, the Lusty Lady is San Francisco's unique, long-standing private-booth "peep show" venue. Every day from nine a.m. until three the next morning, three or four nude (or nearly nude) dancers move about the theatre's mirrored main stage while customers watch from behind glass windows in a semi-circle of a dozen private booths. Dancers alternate between pressing up close to the individual windows and performing for the gallery-at large. While a respectable number of couples and women comprise an increasing portion of the Lusty's clientele, men and masturbation are still the main show in the booths. For those who want custom shows and are willing to pay a little more, there is also one (larger) Private Pleasures booth, where patrons can converse with their private dancer by telephone across the glass and request shows tailored to their particular sexual tastes and fantasies. Over the last seven years, the erotic dancers at the Lusty Lady have repeatedly established themselves as groundbreaking pioneers in the nether world of sexual entertainment. In 1997, they persuaded Service Employees International Union Local 790 to represent them and became the only unionized sexual workplace in the country. From 1997 to 2003, they successfully negotiated annual labor contracts that brought them increased pay, health benefits, guaranteed work shifts, protection against arbitrary discipline and termination, and a general sense of power and control over their work environment. In the Spring of 2003, when the theatre's owners responded to the latest contract negotiation by announcing they were simply going to close up shop, the dancers and support staff at the Lusty banded together and decided to buy the business and run it themselves. After negotiating a purchase with the Lusty's surprisingly cooperative owners, the dancers at the Lusty found themselves the collective owners of one of San Francisco's oldest sex entertainment institutions. Giddy with their back-to-back successes, the dancers looked to the future with unbridled creativity and enthusiasm. "We're about to see a new Golden Era at the Lusty Lady," Board Member Pepper (her stage name) predicted last summer. "Now that we're working for ourselves, everyone feels fresh and friendly, and that affects how we relate to each other and how we relate to the customers. The quality of everyone's performance is going up. The theatre is cleaner than ever, and we're considering a number of capital improvements." Innovative ideas for reorganization and performance events blossomed like flowers in the Spring. A series of Women's Nights were organized to expand the Lusty's welcome beyond its traditionally male customer base -- with dancers greeting nervous new women customers at the door, giving them guided tours, helping them become comfortable in a new environment. Men were barred for the night (unless accompanied by a woman). One set of viewing booths was reserved for women, and interested women could even get showgirl makeovers from dancers, borrow some sexy lingerie, and take a shot at being erotic dancers for a day -- for the enjoyment of their partners, or the general public, as they wished. A Valentine's Day special event came six months later. "Girl Storm Night" -- a big sexy sleepover on stage -- is coming soon. On May 14, the Lusty will celebrate it's first anniversary of sex worker self-determination with an all day (11 am-3 am) "May Day Play Day," complete with backstage tours, a variety of special stage shows, topless shoe-shines, shower shows in the dressing room, makeovers for women, and what Board Member Donna Delinqua describes as "lots of shenanigans." But even Cinderella and Prince (or Princess) Charming have to deal with the realities of married life once the magic of pumpkins and glass slippers wears off. "It's been a hard year," Delinqua acknowledges, as we meet for lunch at an inexpensive Chinese restaurant a block from the theatre. "We've been hurt by the downturn in the local economy, just like everyone else. And we've found that the skills and attitude that it takes to hold together when you're fighting a common enemy are not the same skills it takes to run a business when there's no outside focus to supply a shared sense of purpose and perspective." Delinqua, a graduate student in English Literature who's about to complete her doctorate, notes that we live in a culture oriented to hierarchies of authority, rather than to institutions with a more democratic distribution of power and responsibility. "We were all used to relating to the theatre management as the boss," she explains. "After we became a collective, it was easy to think of the Board of Directors as the new bosses and relate to them as such." In the absence of imposed outside authority, it was up to the dancers to decide how they wanted to deal with potentially explosive issues of conflict and discipline. "Everyone thought, 'Great, now we're free to do what we want,'" Delinqua remembers. "But when people were habitually late for work, or just didn't show up, we began to realize that we needed systems of discipline to hold the whole thing together. At the beginning, people were excited about the privileges of working for ourselves, but they didn't always want to step up to the responsibilities." An elected Board of seven directors, together with a Lead Team of four dancers and two support staff, took charge of developing rules to ensure that the business functioned properly. "Some people feel that everyone should get to make every decision," Delinqua notes. "But if we did that we'd be meeting all the time." Records were kept of times when people were late to work, and those who were late repeatedly were disciplined. "The difference [from before] is that where people used to be fired for being late, now they're just suspended, at least at first." Board and Lead Team members don't receive financial or disciplinary privileges, and are treated the same as everyone else. Delinqua notes that Board members have themselves been suspended at times. Beyond simply showing up to work, dancers are expected to be "professional" about their hair, their make-up, and their costumes. They're also expected to make good eye contact with customers, to help customers feel welcomed and appreciated, and to stay creative and bring variety to their dance routines. The most difficult issue, says Delinqua, is evaluating the performances of the dancers. An initial system of broad peer evaluation was abandoned as too time-consuming. Now evaluations are done by the members of the dancers' Lead Team. It's a sensitive process, and Delinqua notes that it's easy for dancers to become defensive about criticism of their shows or their appearance. "After so many bad experiences with management trying to make people fit into a specific mode, we try to stay away from judging people's bodies or their shows, but we do expect dancers to be professional about their appearance and to have a positive attitude about their work," she explains. The four Lead Team dancers (elected for six-month terms) are responsible for scheduling, hiring, firing, and discipline. Dancers typically work three or four four-hour shifts per week. Many are artists or students and happy to work only 12-16 hours a week, but some want additional shifts and there is some competition for work shifts. Shortages in available shifts are spread through the group as evenly as possible, Delinqua says. Dancers presently earn $20-23 an hour, and keep 55% of receipts when they work the Private Pleasures booth. Dancer turnover, notoriously high throughout the sex entertainment industry, has dropped to a trickle. Of the 40 dancers who worked at the Lusty when the theatre went coop a year ago, about 30 are still there. New dancers are hired through "amateur night" auditions, held twice over the last year. The collective has just completed its first annual review of the union contract negotiated last Spring with the theatre's old management, a process that put them in the odd position of effectively negotiating a contract with themselves. The proposed new contract incorporates provisions suggested at meetings by participating dancers and staff. Changes include a pay increase for start-up support staff, mandatory coop and union membership for all workers and, most significantly, a new revenue-based pay system in place of fixed hourly wages, that will pass the ups and downs of revenue receipts directly along to the dancers. "Everyone will have a clear sense of how the quality of their work has direct financial consequences," Delinqua points out. The new contract will be voted on in the weeks ahead, and a new Board of Directors is to be elected at the membership meeting in May. I ask Delinqua if she's going to run for a second term on the Board. "Hell no," she says, shaking her head with a laugh. "I'm tired." Significantly, none of the current Board members are running for re-election, though a full slate of new candidates has been nominated to take their place. There have been disputes and hurt feelings, but the
general feeling among the dancers is far more positive than
it was before the collective was formed. "The ongoing
internal challenge is for us to change how we think about
work and our jobs," says Delinqua. "It's something we're
going to be struggling with for a long time." Candye Kane is a marvelous blues singer whose recordings and stage shows unapologetically celebrate the sexuality of many people marginalized by mainstream culture -- most notably large women, bisexuals, and sex workers. Candye, who is herself both large and bisexual, supported herself financially while her music career was getting off the ground by modeling nude for porn magazines, stripping, making porn videos, and doing phone sex. Never ashamed or embarrassed about her sexual desires or her sex work, she would proudly show her music industry friends the latest issue of Juggs or Hefty Mamas that featured her photos, or talk proudly about her latest video. Her refusal to "tone down" her sexuality cost her her first big record contract and her relationship with her first major agent. Stunned and bereft, but never one to hide her sexual core, Candye shifted her music from country to blues, where she found a musical home and a musical tradition that allowed her to be her full sexual self and be successful at the same time. She has played with such blues greats as B. B. King, Etta James, Albert Collins and Dr. John. Her recordings include "The Toughest Girl Alive," "Any Woman's Blues," "Swango," "Diva La Grande," and her latest release, "Whole Lotta Love." Her songs include such sexy, sexual favorites as "Two Hundred Pounds of Fun," "I'm in Love with a Girl," "Let's Commit Adultery," "Seven Men a Week," "Fit, Fat and Fine," "You Need A Great Big Woman," "Let's Put the X Back in Xmas," and "All You Can Eat (and You Can Eat It All Night Long)." Her shows, which have been described as "a revival meeting in the parking lot of a porn store," are opportunities for sexual outlaws of all kinds to come together, dance, and celebrate sexual existence in all its forms. I recently had an opportunity to interview Candye about the sexual themes in her music and her sex work background. DS: I know that before you became a singer, you had done stripping and modeling and so on. Was there anything positive you took away from that experience that affected your decision to become a professional singer? CK: Being on the covers of magazines like Hefty Mamas and Whoppers was the first time ever I felt like, hey, maybe my big body's okay, maybe there are people who think my big body is attractive. Up until that time, I thought that my career in music was hopeless because I would never be thin. That was an extremely powerful experience for a chubby teenage mom, not only from a self-image standpoint, but also from a financial standpoint. DS: Did your work in the sex industry directly inspire you to pursue a music career? CK: I've wanted to be a singer all my life. But the sex industry directly encouraged my transition into music. There was one time in particular when I picked up my guitar at Market Street Cinema [a San Francisco strip club] and sang to the audience while I was talking to them. The audience was really into it. Of course the management came over the loudspeaker like the voice of God and said, "Put down the guitar and show us your g-string." It became very clear that the management was not supportive of strippers expressing themselves in creative ways. That was a real eye-opener, and the last time I ever stripped on-stage. DS: You mentioned that you have just done a vigil for a murdered sex worker in San Diego. CK: Yes, I just did a vigil Wednesday night [12/17/03]. It was the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers. I lost a friend here in San Diego who was a great person -- Robert Gibson (we called him Tiny), a transgendered performer who was turning tricks on the side. He was stabbed 25 times by a guy named Sean Wilson who stabbed him to death when he found out Tiny was a man. He couldn't handle that he had just had sex with a man, so he killed Tiny. It was a horrible, horrible loss. So when I heard that internationally many of my sex worker friends were organizing memorials for the Green River women [in Seattle] and other women who had been killed in the line of sex work, it really struck a chord with me. I was happy I was not on tour and able to organize this vigil. The vigil was really wonderful. It was very emotional. DS: You mentioned earlier that the vigil got coverage in mainstream media. CK: Yeah, they put me on the news. It's funny, though -- the way they described me in the news just goes to show how ignorant the mainstream media is about sex work. I told the newsman that I had been a sex worker twenty years ago, and that I had been in many situations where I felt my safety was compromised, and that because of that I felt strongly for these women who had been brutalized and murdered -- because it could have been me. So the newsman went on the news and said "Candye Kane hasn't turned a trick in twenty years, but tonight in Balboa Park she held this vigil blah, blah, blah." Well, I never said that I had turned a trick, nor that I'd been a streetwalker. I said I'd been a sex worker, but if you say you're a sex worker, everyone in mainstream media assumes you're a streetwalker. That shows how much people need to be educated about this issue. I'm not going to sit here and give all the definitions of what sex work can be, but my dad was a layout artist years ago for Adam's Film World, which is a porn magazine, and I think my dad qualifies as a sex worker. I think anyone who has worked with sex, or is an educator, or a sex therapist, or any other kind of sex advocate, is a sex worker -- including strippers and prostitutes. We're all in this together. DS: Are you nervous about publicly supporting sex workers the way you do? Has your connection to sex work affected your music career? CK: It's been a double-edged sword. Being a sex worker and being vocal about my background has forged an audience for me that is very wonderful -- kind of a disenfranchised audience, an audience that appreciates my candor and honesty on the subject of sex work, people who understand that it takes a certain amount of courage to speak out about this issue because people are so prejudiced about sex work and stereotype sex workers. But I'm not just vocal about my sex work background. I'm also vocal about sizeism and how that's impacted my life. So big women and large-size people, or any women who have body issues, also come out to my shows and appreciate that level of honesty. But being open about sex work has impacted my career in negative ways too. I get to play blues festivals in cities that tend to be progressive -- I've played the San Francisco Blues Festival, the Santa Cruz Blues Festival, and Monterey. I'm very popular there and have a great following. But I still have to fight to be acknowledged by the mainstream blues community, and I wonder if one of the reasons I'm not more acknowledged by them is because I'm vocal about sex work. Of course it could be because I'm vocal about being a bisexual. Or it could be because I make a point of doing songs about big women, like "Fit, Fat and Fine" or "You Need A Great Big Woman." It could be for a variety of reasons. At festivals or street fairs where there are children, people are sometimes reluctant to hire me. Or if they do, they do it with a caveat. We want you to play the Carlsbad Jazz Series, but we don't want you to be controversial. When somebody says to me, "Don't be controversial," it's hard for me to understand exactly what that means. My sensibilities are from the Candye Kane perspective, and Candye Kane was a teenage gang banger who got pregnant young, a girl who wanted to be a singer her whole life and became a sex worker and a porn star, and then became a punk rock anarchist and used sex work to further her musical career. I've been topless in public and play the piano with my boobs, so it's not a big deal for me to do things that other people may think are outrageous. So when I'm asked to play a festival with kids and tone it down and not be controversial, I agree to do that, but then sometimes I get on stage and I see 300 or 500 people dancing and having a great time. I spot some teenage kids, I spot some little kids, and I think, you know, these people would benefit from hearing my story. There are people here who have dreams themselves. Maybe their dream is to ride a Harley or open a flower shop. Maybe their dream is to be a sex worker too, or to be a singer. So I feel compelled to tell my story. I was a porn star. I did appear on the cover of Floppers. I did use that money to subsidize my career. And when I got to the record companies, the record guys all said the same thing -- renounce your past, lose weight, be a born-again Christian, and if you blow me we'll give you a record deal. So then I launch into a song I do called "Love 'Em and Forgive 'Em." It's all about keeping your dream and not listening to people. "You can't change their minds, or make them wise, all the changes we do, love em and forgive em and let your light shine through." Those are the words to the song. So it's a song that's extremely powerful and I've had so many people come up after the show and thank me for doing the song and thank me for telling my story because it makes them feel powerful. But at festivals like that you're always going to have one or two crotchety people who complain that you were offensive. At this particular festival, the Carlsbad Jazz Series, I had a lady say that she wasn't going to allow me to go back on stage after my break because I was offensive, because I said "blow me" on stage. It's really astounding to me. It's 2003, where kids are watching television all the time and seeing violence on America's Most Wanted and people getting their heads blown off on every other channel, and people on MTV like Britney Spears and Christina Agulera barely dressed and making sexual overtures constantly in every song, and seeing Gap ads where little kids are exploited and turned into sex objects. With all that going on, how is me playing piano with my breasts and saying "blow me" in the context of a story offensive? DS: Didn't you lose your first big record contract over the issue of whether you would tone down your sexuality? CK: That's what that whole song is about. I was a country singer in the beginning of my career and, in 1986, I signed a big record deal with CBS/Epic. I had a manager, Sherman Halsey, who really felt strongly about me covering up my past. He gave me lectures over lunch that I needed to lose weight and not be so controversial -- all of those lines that I use in "Love 'Em and Forgive 'Em" were lines directly from Sherman. Don't say the F word on stage. Don't let people know that you're smoking pot. Don't talk about sex work. Don't talk about your past -- in fact say you're ashamed of your past, that you just did it to survive as a teenage mom and that it's behind you now, that you're a serious vocalist and you don't want to discuss it any more. I think his approach was a valid one. Perhaps if I'd done it his way and done all the things he said I would be a big country star by now. But there was something dishonest about it and I wasn't committed to doing it, even though I paid him lip service and said I would. I just thought I could continue to keep my sex work life and my musical life separate, which is what I'd always done. Unfortunately for me, Sherman was really watching me. The day I was supposed to sign a $150,000 deal with CBS/Epic, Sherman took me aside and said, "Look, you haven't done anything I've said. You haven't lost any weight. You're on the cover of Gent this month. You're cussing like a truck driver. We're going into this big meeting and I've completely sold you as something you're not. I can't in good conscience follow through with this meeting when you haven't done any of the things I've asked you to do. Because you haven't changed, I'm calling off the meeting." I was hysterical, of course, and crying, and begging him to go through with the meeting, that once we signed the contract he could drop me I could find someone else. But he refused and so I lost my big record deal with CBS/Epic because I wasn't willing to lie about my background and cover up who I was. That moment was real tragedy for me. I was devastated. I thought I would give up singing completely and never go back. I didn't have anywhere to turn. I didn't know a lot of other sex workers. I didn't have friends who were both musicians and sex workers. I had a solid group of punk rock musicians in LA who were my friends -- the guys from Black Flag and the Circle Jerks, and The Blasters, and Los Lobos. At that time in LA, the early 80s, you could see punk rock bands and Los Lobos and Dwight Yoakum, everybody on one stage. Because I was a sex worker, I was considered a punk rock anarchist, doing it my own way. Everyone said, "Candye be yourself. Be honest." Dwight Yoakum said to me, "Candye, don't hide who you are. That's what makes you unique, what makes you great." It took a lot for me to get back on my feet after that experience. I didn't want to be a singer any more. But then I discovered blues, and blues changed my life. In blues I discovered a place where I could be myself, where I could be big and brassy and flamboyant and bisexual -- where there was a long history of women just like me. That was extremely vindicating. DS: Is that when you began putting more directly sexual material into your music? CK: Well, yes, I saw that it could be done. If you go back and start listening to the old blues songs, there are so many that are laced with sexual innuendo. Memphis Minnie's song, "Won't You Be My Chauffeur," has nothing to do with driving a car. "Won't you be my chauffeur, I want you to drive me, I want you to drive me downtown." She's not talking about driving, she's talking about something else. There were a lot of songs like, "Press My Buttons" and "Give My Bell a Ring," "Put that Hot Dog in My Bun," the Bessie Smith song "I Want Some Sugar in My Bowl." All of those songs were sexual innuendo songs. I started reading about these blues women. Memphis Minnie wrote all kinds of songs about street walkers and prostitution. "Street Walking Blues." "Hustling Blues." In her autobiography it says that she was turning tricks on the side, between her shows. It was rumored that Bessie Smith would sing downstairs in the foyer of the brothels while the men were drinking their whiskey and selecting their women, and that she would go upstairs and turn a trick now and then herself. There were plenty of women in the blues who were gay or bisexual, like Big Momma Thornton and Alberta Hunter. Billie Holiday was rumored to be bisexual and have affairs with women. All of a sudden I found this place in blues where women were large-sized, where they were singing about sexual experiences, where they were bisexual, and it was ok. And I said, wait a minute, I fit perfectly into this group. So it was natural to take the experience and the background that I had from being a sex worker and put it into my music. And it was so freeing and liberating to be able to do that. All of a sudden, I didn't have to hide who I was. I could freely sing about it. I also started covering the sexy songs of some of those early blues women. I named the first recording I made "Burlesque Swing," and that became a description of my music because it was titillating and nasty and teasing like the old burlesque, but it was also swing style so you could dance to it. And, of course, "swing" also has a double meaning, about swingers. I recorded "Press My Buttons" and "Give My Bell a Ring" and "That's My Daddy with the Big Long Sliding Thing" and "Put It All in There," a song I still do now. Now the writer of that song, George "Wild Child" Butler, says it's about putting money in the bank. But when I sing it, it becomes about something totally different. I felt like I had found my home, a place where I could completely be myself. It's ironic that I now get shunned by some of the blues community for doing the very thing that the early blues women were doing. I don't think they get it. Because I'm young and white and also talk about political issues like legalizing prostitution, people get offended, instead of seeing how I'm carrying on a proud tradition of women in the blues. DS: I've seen people at your shows get tremendous confirmation -- whether it's about being big women, about being dykes, about being bisexual, or just about being openly sexual people in general. I think that's one of the special things you do that contributes to people having a really good time at your shows. Do you see yourself as a sexual evangelist? As a campaigner and advocate for open sexuality, for unconventional sexuality? CK: Well, my show's been described as a revival meeting in the parking lot of an x-rated book store. I think it does have a revival meeting feel to it. I've taken all the different parts of my life and put them together in one big melting pot of sexual celebration and size celebration. I mean, the body and sexuality are impossibly linked. There's no way you can have sex without a body, and there's no way you can really enjoy sex, I don't think, if you don't accept and love your body, if you don't let your body do what it's supposed to do. So I think those issues are really connected. Am I a sexual libertine? I guess I am. I don't think of myself as being a big role model for anything. I think of myself as just sharing my experience with people, and hoping that the experience rubs off on them. When people respond to my honesty, when they respond to the songs and the content of the songs, it's really rewarding. It all comes together at that moment. Their energy and their love empowers me too. I have issues about sexuality and about my body like everyone does, issues I struggle with every day. But when I sing a song like "Fit, Fat and Fine" or "Two Hundred Pounds of Fun" or "I'm the Toughest Girl Alive" -- when people respond it feeds my own sense of well-being -- even though I'm not the toughest girl alive, even though I don't think my body is beautiful 100% of the time. So the support is mutual. It's like mutual masturbation. Let's do this all together and we'll all feel good and it will free all of us. DS: Have you always been open and uninhibited and unapologetic about your sexuality? CK: When I was a kid I was kind of a tomboy, but there was a sexual element to my life too. My dad was a graphic artist for Adam's Film World, a men's magazine, and he was also a body painter. It was the 60s. He would take me with him to the beach and they'd have these paint-ins where they'd sit and rope off an area and women would come and be topless and my dad and his friend would paint daisies and peace signs on these women. So I was around a lot of nudity as a little kid. One time, when my dad was working as a graphic artist, he took me to work with him. Every time I went into his cubicle he would cover up his drafting board with newspapers, so I couldn't see what he was working on. Of course, being a precocious 9-year-old, as soon as he left I lifted up the newspapers and saw all these pictures of people having sex, and all kinds of group pictures of nude people. My dad's other gig was being an illustrator for Bible coloring books. I was always coloring Jesus on the cross and Moses parting the Red Sea. So I got an interesting, unconscious message from my dad that it was ok to have fun and make money with nudity, and also with religion. I got the message early on that you could integrate religion and sexuality. It was sort of destiny for me to end up doing that. I don't think my dad knew that he was encouraging me in such a strange way, but that's definitely what ended up happening. Was I sexual? I fell in love at 16, and had a baby at 17. I think I was bisexual even then. I had a crush on my track coach. She was awesome and I used to go early to class to see her prance around in her little white shorts with her tan body. I was in love with her, but I didn't know there was a name for that, for bisexuality. It wasn't until years later, when I did my first video with Christy Canyon, that I realized that I like this, that this is a good thing. So I didn't really accept myself and come into my sexual persona, feel at home in my sexual being, until I was in my 20s. I always knew that the sex business was a good thing for me. I always felt proud when I was on the cover of magazines. All the punk rockers in Hollywood knew about my sex work because I'd bring copies of my magazines -- Gent or Juggs or Velvet, whatever current issue I was on -- to show everybody. I also had a column I wrote for a while, an advice column called "Candye's Corner" in Gent magazine. By virtue of posing naked I suddenly became a sex expert, sort of the Dr. Ruth of the big tits set. It was incredibly powerful for me. I was proud of what I was doing. I was the first celebrity in my family. I raced home and showed my first cover to my mom. I didn't have the sense of shame that a lot of people have. It wasn't until later that I realized that some people weren't as thrilled as I was about seeing me on the cover of men's magazines. But I was proud of what I was doing. I just knew it was good for me, that it was good for my self-esteem, that it was making me money, that it was enabling me to do what I really wanted to do, which was to make music. I was already a sex-positive feminist, even though I had never heard that term. I didn't know there was anyone else like me. I had met some sex workers in my early days of modeling. I met Annie Sprinkle in New York. I did Montel Williams and some other talk shows with Hyapatia Lee. But I didn't have a solid network of sex work friends. I'd go do my job as a sex worker and then hang out in Hollywood with musicians. I didn't find about the sex worker network until much later, when I took a women's studies class in junior college. All of a sudden I saw that there were other women who also felt good about being sex workers. It was a huge eye opener. I was no longer an island. I started networking with people like Carol Queen and Annie Sprinkle. It was incredible to find out that there was actually a name for what I was. I was a sex-positive, feminist, bisexual, former-illegitimate-teenage-welfare-mom from East LA. I could name myself. I know a lot of people want to shy away from labels, but for me it felt good to be able to fit into a group and have a label. It said, ok, this is what I am and it's all right. DS: What's the bottom line about sex that you would like to tell the world? If you were going to make a statement to your audience about sex -- yours, theirs, everybody's -- what you want them to get from your work and your music, what would that be? CK: Well, my first goal would be about body image. There's a lot of pressure in our culture to look a certain way and be a certain way. There's a lot of money spent making us feel like we're not good enough the way we are. It's all over advertising, on television, in magazines. You don't smell good enough, cover it up with this. You're too hairy, take it off with this. You're too fat, diet this way. You could go crazy if you took these advertising images seriously. Everyone has issues about their body. Everyone's got not enough in the right place, or too much in the wrong place, or something that used to be in one place but has shifted to another place. Well, that's just age and the way that our bodies work. So number one, I think that body acceptance is super super important. It's very much linked to sexuality and feeling good sexually. I believe in positive affirmation -- taking the parts of your body that you don't like and -- I do this on stage sometimes, rub my belly or my ass and say, You're ok. You're beautiful and soft. You're a wonderful place to grab on to during sex. Secondly, I think that sexuality and life are intrinsically linked. If you're sexually adventurous, then you can be adventurous in life. Life is short and unpredictable. I learned that after losing my friend, Tiny, the way I did -- one day he was here, the next day he was dead. People don't know when their time is up and when they're going to be gone. So to spend your life in fear, worrying about how you look, or about what's going to happen next, or about whether you should try what you've always wanted to but you're afraid, is just impossibly limiting. If you can be sexually adventurous, if you can start off being sexually adventurous with a partner in a safe environment, try new things that maybe you're afraid to try -- I think that will carry over into the rest of your life. Maybe next time you'll try sushi even though you've never eaten it before. Maybe next time you'll try buying a fast convertible even though you've always been a four-door-sedan kind of guy. I think it's important to be adventurous in life and not be afraid to try new things. Maybe you won't like it. It's ok to try something and say, you know, I tried that and it wasn't for me. I think the main problem with American culture is that fear is dictated to us from every angle -- fear of ourselves, fear of the unknown, fear of anything different or foreign to us. Sex is a good way to move past that. Look at the difference between Europe and the United States. In the United States, men aren't affectionate and demonstrative with each other. You go to Italy or to many countries in Europe and men are kissing each other all over, hugging and having a great time. There's no threat to their masculinity over it. American men have been robbed of the opportunity and the experience and the ability to be affectionate with each other. They're afraid of that. They're afraid that maybe they might like it, or that somebody might think they're gay, oh my god! That fear carries over everywhere. DS: Women even more, I think. CK: I think so too, although women's fear is different. Women's fear tends to be I'm afraid to show my body, what will someone think. Or, oh my god, if I go experience sex with two guys at once somebody might say I'm a slut. It's a different kind of fear. If we can just teach ourselves to be a little more adventurous, and a little more accepting of other people, we'll learn how to accept ourselves, too. And what better gift can you give yourself than to accept yourself the way you are. 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You can also contact Candye directly at candye@candyekane.com. "Art is the search for meaning, the experience of meaning made visible. In a work of art, soul meets soul; essence meets essence. Art is... the continuous removal of veils in order to expose the soul -- the individual soul, the common soul, the universal soul." -- Tom Millea, photographer "Poetry... is the manifestation/translation of a vision, an illumination, an experience.... One primary responsibility on the part of the poet [is] that he tell the truth... as beautifully, as amazingly, as he can; that he ignite his own sense of wonder; that he work alchemy within the language." -- Lenore Kandel, poet Art and sex. Together. The mixture of the two. Think about it. What happens when we apply the language of art, the language of fine art, to the subject of sex? Hard to imagine, isn't it? We don't generally put art and sex in the same breath, in the same sentence, in the same room, in the same part of town. Indeed, some say that sex and fine art are antithetical by their very natures and therefore should be kept apart, that the introduction of sex -- which is low and unclean -- somehow sullies anything in the realm of fine art -- which is high and virtuous. In 2002, the New York State Board of Regents, responding to a petition from the Museum of Sex for recognition as a non-profit artistic institution, proclaimed that the very name "Museum of Sex" was ludicrous, that the subject of sex would "defame" and "ridicule" the essential concept of what a museum was all about. Why does our culture keep the idea of sex and the idea of fine art so far apart? All the other grand aspects of life -- the other grand dilemmas of life -- are familiar and well-respected subjects for artists of all disciplines. Love, traditionally so close to sex, is a veritable home base for artistic inspiration. What more appropriate subject could there be for art than love? Great paintings, great novels, great poetry, great sculpture, great photography -- there are dozens, hundreds, of examples of each that address one aspect or another of love, inspiring praise and wonder from all strata of society. The same is true of art and beauty, whose interface we take for granted -- a time-honored artistic convention, beyond question, beyond reproach. Art and joy, art and tragedy, art and religion, art and death -- all of these connections we honor and encourage. We apply the language of art to all the fundamental issues of being alive, all the great wonders of life, all the great mysteries. We invite art to offer us insight into the complexity of what it means to be alive and to be human, and we are enriched, expanded, and grateful when it does. Art helps us to understand ourselves, our place in the world, our place in the universe. It adds depth and subtlety, complexity and nuance, to how we see ourselves, our lives, and the people around us. It lifts us beyond the mundane, beyond the temptation to be simplistic, beyond kitsch. It reminds us about what is important, about the questions that the noise of daily life and the assault of facile media too easily shout into the background. Indeed, it's the desire to say something meaningful about life's big issues, to express some deep feeling, to convey some vital experience, that inspires the creation of most great art, and these artistic expressions speak to us in ways that are simply not available through other means of communication. We learn things from art -- whether it be visual or verbal, paintings or novels, photos or poems -- that we cannot learn from scientific treatises, from newspaper reports, from documentary narratives, from statistical analyses of quantifiable data, even from counselors and therapists. All of this vital insight, all of this enlightening perspective, all of this subtle wisdom, is denied us in relation to sex when we decree, formally or informally, that fine art and sex must have nothing to do with each other. Without a cultural base of true sexual art -- work that is genuinely both sexual an artistic -- the ways we think about sex and the ways we think about ourselves as sexual people become stale, repetitive, and trivialized. Because we live in a culture that is obsessed with sex, a culture that is loaded to the gills with flip sexual references and innuendoes, we are flooded with messages that collectively encourage us to believe that sex is trivial and superficial, that sex is nothing more than a compulsion (at worst), or an amusement (at best). Advertising, television, Hollywood, and commercial pornography all share this light-hearted, uncomplicated view of sex. It is the view of sex that most people want to hear. It is the view of sex that sells a seemingly infinite range of commercial products. It is the view of sex that fits most comfortably into our sexual fantasies, and therefore is most pleasing and effective when we want to masturbate. But art is not about selling commercial products and art is not primarily about turning us on and getting us off. Not that there's anything wrong with sexual material whose main intent is to make our times of masturbation more enjoyable. But this is a different function from what we generally ask of art. What we want from art is that it tell the truth about its subject, and tell that truth in an illuminating way -- as both photographer Tom Millea and poet Lenore Kandel suggest in the quotes above. We don't ask a photograph or a novel about grief to help us grieve better, faster, or more intensely. We ask it to convey something about grief, to tell us something about grief, that we don't already know. Or, perhaps, to portray grief in a way that is so clear, so powerful, so accurate, that the portrayal resonates with something inside us and therefore helps us see something that we didn't know was there, or see something differently from how we saw it before. We read a story or a poem, we see a painting or a photograph, and it gives us language that we didn't have before to understand what we have been experiencing. "Yes," we say, "that's it. That's what I feel. That's what I have felt." And as a result we grow. God knows, we can use all the help we can get to see and understand our sexuality more thoroughly, which makes the presence -- and the absence -- of artful examination of sex -- all the more important. Even though it has always been, and continues to be, an uphill battle socially and politically, the last fifty years have seen the slow, painful emergence of some truly illuminating artistic perspectives on sex. In literature, there was the groundbreaking work of D. H. Lawrence and Henry Miller, two writers who directly and truthfully portrayed sex, not as some idealized fantasy, but in the matrix of the real confusions, fears, and conflicts that were at the core of their respective sexual worlds. For telling the truth about sex, for refusing to dilute either the importance of sex or its complexity, both Miller and Lawrence were attacked as immoral, and ridiculed as insignificant hacks. For decades, this writing, now acknowledged as among the finest English prose of the twentieth century, could not be published in the U.S. for fear of subjecting its publishers to obscenity prosecution. Eventually, of course, the work of both Miller and Lawrence was indeed published and successfully defended in court, and the idea that it was artistically legitimate to write so frankly and directly about sex became accepted in even the most established literary circles. As a result, many others have written eloquently and perceptively about sex, speaking their own sexual truths, confirming the sexual realities of thousands, millions, of readers. Gore Vidal, Lenore Kandel, Dorothy Allison, Marco Vassi, John Berger, Monique Vittig come to mind, but there are hundreds of others. Collectively, these writers about sex have built a sex-literary foundation from which truly thoughtful, complex sexual fiction continues to spring. In the world of visual art, it has been more difficult for sex and fine art to establish widely accepted cultural ground. In 1968, Betty Dodson pioneered a monumental show of powerful sexual drawings -- an exhibit of beautiful images that depicted couples being sexual in no uncertain terms. Her drawings were exhibited in the heart of New York's respectable Madison Avenue gallery world, and well received by critics and the public alike. A subsequent show of her work, however, celebrating women masturbating, proved more than the established New York art world could handle. The show was condemned critically, a blow from which both Dodson and mainstream New York art have yet to recover. In the realm of fine art sexual photography, there has been an even stronger objection to the idea of sexual fine art. Although there has been a truly monumental outpouring of thoughtful, brilliant work by dozens of skilled photographers, particularly in the last ten or fifteen years, little of this photography has been shown in mainstream galleries and museums, or published by mainstream presses. As a result, the contribution this work could be offering toward our understanding and appreciation of sex has been extremely limited. A pioneering retrospective of celebrity photographer Robert Mapplethorpe's work, including a generous sampling of Mapplethorpe's intensely explicit homoerotic s/sexual imagery, was shown at New York's respected Whitney Museum in 1988 without major fuss or critical condemnation. A similar Mapplethorpe retrospective in 1990, however, became the subject of intense political controversy, and even police intervention. The Corcoran Museum in Washington, D.C. canceled a scheduled Mapplethorpe exhibit under the heat of right-wing Congressional criticism, setting off a national debate about Mapplethorpe's work and, more generally, about publicly-funded art that deals directly with sex. The Mapplethorpe exhibit did find homes in respected museums in Boston, Berkeley, and Cincinnati, but seven of the exhibit's photos were physically seized by police when the show opened in Cincinnati, and the curator of the museum was arrested and charged with obscenity. (He was later acquitted.) So, while the Whitney Museum's courage in showing Mapplethorpe's sexual work was a real breakthrough in legitimizing the intersection of fine art photography and sex, the subsequent controversies served to warn other galleries and museums of potentially dire consequences if they ever dared to exhibit equally sexual work, regardless of how artful or thoughtful that work might be. In the wake of the Mapplethorpe flap, and in the increasingly antisexual political climate of the 1990s, fine art sexual photography remained most decidedly outside the boundaries of anything resembling mainstream legitimacy. In an attempt to draw attention to marginalized, but
beautiful and important, fine art sexual photography, I
began work five years ago on a book that I hoped would be a
testimonial to the possibilities and the importance of this
body of work. That book, "Photo Sex: Fine Art Sexual
Photography Comes of Age," has just been published by Down
There Press. "Photo Sex" brings 115 sexual photographs by 31
photographers together in one volume in the hope that the
collective power and beauty of these images can demonstrate
to the non-sexual art world that it is indeed possible to
combine unambiguous sexual focus with high artistic quality
and intent in the photographic medium. Note: Mark I.
Chester, one of the book's contributors, has posted
information about Photo Sex -- including short notes about
each of the photographers and a gallery of 31 images from
the book -- on his website at mchester.best.vwh.net/ps.html
The verdict is still out on how our culture feels about
the integration of art and sex in the visual realm, and most
pointedly in the realm of photography. One thing is sure,
however: As long as we continue to dismiss and punish
artists who choose to honor sex as an important,
fascinating, and complex aspect of life, the more
impoverished all of our sexual perspectives and sexual lives
will be. Bits and Pieces: Sexual Signs of
the Times Sexual signs of the times show up just about every day. Stories that are hardly major news, but that cast a little light on the grand collage we could call American Sexual Culture -- that huge umbrella no one can quite see, but everyone wants to measure themselves against. The stories pour in from any number of sources -- reading the papers, emails from friends, postings on listserves, notes from Comes Naturally subscribers and from other people in the sex-curious network. Sometimes they're humorous, sometimes upsetting, sometimes inspiring, in the way of thousands of unacclaimed every-day heroes -- people who stand up for their sexual rights and preferences, even when it means taking a risk, emotional or otherwise. I gather the stories in a file folder that grows increasingly heavy, week after week, where it sits at the back of my desk -- fodder, I think hopefully, for future columns. Here are a few samples from that file. Nothing earth-shaking, really. But collectively they may just have something to say about where we are and where we're going with sex and sex-related issues in these uncertain times. New scanning technology for passengers passing through airport security may well test how far people are willing to go in the name of protection against potential terrorist attacks. The Transportation Security Administration is testing a new "backscatter" system that scatters X-rays to detect plastic weapons and explosive materials invisible to devices currently used at airport security gates. The backscatter system, however, also has the effect of projecting naked black-and-white images of each passenger it scans. Backscatter X-rays are reflected by skin and, more darkly, by dense material like metal or plastic, but not by fabrics. Instead of seeing inside the luggage of the person in front of you as you pass through airport security, you'll see inside their clothes. We used to wonder what Superman saw when he looked at Lois Lane with his X-ray vision. With backscatter, every airport security guard would get to play Superman. Susan Hallowell, director of TSA's security lab, admits that submitting to backscattering "basically makes you look fat and naked." On the other hand, she notes, it adds a protection against someone smuggling plastic explosives onto a plane. Backscatter generators cost something between $100,000 and $200,000 per unit. They use small amounts of radiation, about the same as standing in the sun. But is the American General Public ready be seen naked by other passengers and security guards in the name of air travel safety? Maybe they are. Maybe personal modesty is a small price to play for security in the post-9/11 world. Maybe this is the historic moment that naturists have long been dreaming of, when people will finally realize that there's nothing shameful about the naked human body. TSA is not so sure. This is America, after all, not Old Europe. They're trying to develop technology that will recognize and blur certain "private" (and certainly unnamed) parts of the body -- kind of an electronic fig leaf. Reports that there has been an upsurge in applications among young men, gay, straight, and bi, for security checker positions at airports could not be confirmed. Nor could reports be confirmed that terrorists are working frantically to develop ways of disguising explosive devices as body piercings. As the New World Order of trading self-revelation for the privilege of flying settles into the collective consciousness, less extensive invasions of the personal privacy of air travel passengers are becoming increasingly common and increasingly accepted as routine. Checked baggage is now routinely opened and inspected, and claims against airlines for theft of articles from luggage has reached levels unheard of in pre-9/11 days. How does this affect the sex lives of air travelers? Are people choosing to leave their sex toys, videos, and other entertainments at home when they fly, lest their personal articles be inspected, questioned, fondled, and possibly retained by airport personnel? What equipment do people bring or leave home when they fly to large s/m gatherings like the annual Black Rose Leather Retreat in Washington, D.C.? What does happen to people with genital body piercings when they go through airport security? Most air travelers seem to be putting up with the increased presence of Big Brother with a shrug and a sigh. Not so Renee Koutsouradis. Koutsouradis is suing Delta Air Lines for being, she says, publicly humiliated when she was whisked out of a Delta flight from Dallas-Forth Worth airport and questioned about a sex toy she had packed in one of her bags. Koutsouradis's flight was about to take off when her name was called over the plane's loudspeaker. A security agent informed her that something was vibrating in one of her checked bags. She explained that it was just a vibrator, but the agent insisted that she accompany him to where her bag had been laid out on the tarmac alongside the plane. She says he then made her open the bag, take out the vibrator, and hold it up for all to see -- other passengers in the plane, baggage handlers, and security inspectors alike. She says Delta employees "began laughing hysterically" and made a number of "obnoxious and sexually harassing comments." Koutsouradis was neither amused nor intimidated by the incident. She is suing Delta for negligence, intentional infliction of distress, and gender discrimination. Renee Koutsouradis has an ally and fellow spirit in Tamie Dragone of Salina, Kansas, who is also refusing to accept that intrusions into personal lives are just part and parcel of everyday life in 21st century America. Dragone is suing her local Wal-Mart Supercenter for humiliating her and invading her family's privacy by turning a series of innocent photos of her 3-year-old daughter in to Salina police. The photos are of Dragone's daughter playing in a backyard swimming pool and lying around naked on the living room floor. Dragone says she and her children were detained at the Wal-Mart store for 45 minutes while she was questioned by police officers about the photos. She was eventually allowed to leave, but not to keep her photos. No criminal charges were filed against her. "There was nothing inappropriate about [the photos]," Dragone told the Salina Journal. "This was a child being a child. They totally invaded my privacy and made me feel like a criminal." "This is about the most humiliating experience I've ever been through," she added. "I've shopped [at that store] on a regular basis, two or three times a week, for the last couple of years. There are employees there who know me by my face." Dragone is seeking $75,000 in actual damages, and unspecified punitive damages as well. Edward Law, a quadriplegic who uses an electric wheelchair, is not afraid to insist that he have the same sexual rights and opportunities as anyone else, including the right to have a lap dance in relative privacy. Law has sued the Wildside Adult Sports Cabaret in West Palm Beach, Florida, because, he says, the areas in the club for private lap dances are not wheelchair accessible. The manager of the club argues that Law has other areas in the club where he can have a lap dance, but Law's lawyer, Anthony J. Brady, Jr., says that "forcing Mr. Law to endure a lap dance in the open would be the equivalent of requiring him to go to the bathroom in public," according to The New York Times. "It's really about freedom," Brady told the Times. "Separate but equal is not good enough." Mark Foley, the Republican who represents West Palm Beach in Congress, is far from sympathetic to his constituent's sexual outspokenness. Foley dismissed as "silly" the idea that the Americans with Disabilities Act be used to insure that people with disabilities can have sex on an equal basis with people who are not disabled -- at least as far as lap dances are concerned. Foley did not specify exactly which sexual desires he thought were legitimate for people with disabilities to pursue. Kathleen Faye Ball, a woman with muscular dystrophy, is also insisting that her sexual rights not be restricted to the monogamous straight and narrow. Ball is suing Club Jacaranda, a Melbourne, Australia swingers club, after she was told not to return because she uses a wheelchair. When told she would not be welcome at future club parties, Ball refused to leave and demanded a written guarantee that she could participate in future sex parties, just like all the other paying customers. She was eventually removed from the club by police. Ball says that Club Jacaranda was "horrified" when she showed up at their swingers party in a wheelchair and that they tried to make her stay in a corner away from other people. When she said she intended to come back for more, she was told to stay away. As a result of her treatment, Ball says, she suffered a panic attack and felt "completely demoralized, ugly, asexualized, and dehumanized." "This is a political stand for the rights of all people with disabilities," says Ball. "We have the right to access goods and services within the sex industry under the same terms and conditions as any other person. We are not freaks and we are not perpetual children. We have exactly the same feelings, urges, needs and desires as anyone else." When 17-year-old Mary Loeffler posted a life-size painting of herself in a red dress with her left breast exposed outside the Wheeling (Illinois) High School cafeteria, school administrators told her she had to take the painting down. Loeffler, a senior art student who will be attending Chicago Art Institute this Fall, responded by reposting the painting the next day, this time with the bare breast covered by a patch of fluorescent green construction paper. Loeffler, dressed all in black, wore a matching patch of bright green construction paper over her own left breast as well. Dozens of other students wore bright green patches over their breasts in support of Loeffler. A number of boys put bright green patches over their crotches as well "Censoring me was a ridiculous act," Loeffler explained to the Chicago Tribune, "so I countered with an equally ridiculous act." Some 40 students demonstrated their support for Loeffler in front of the school, carrying signs that read "Wheeling Censors Art." Principal Dottie Sievert put up with the protests (as long as students stayed off the grass, out of the street, and didn't miss any classes), but stood by her refusal to allow the bare breast to be shown at the school. "It may be a wonderful picture," Sievert said, "but it is not appropriate for a school." "I thought people here were more honest and accepting," Loeffler told a Tribune reporter. "Obviously they aren't." A strip club in Western Pennsylvania is offering drive-through shows for customers who don't want to get out of their cars in pursuit of sexual entertainment. Customers drive up to a window at the back of the Climax Gentlemen's Club in Delmont, where they show proof that they're over 18 and pay $5 per minute. Then they pull forward to a second window where they watch a nude dancer for as long as they've paid for. Most customers pay for just a few minutes, though some have paid as much as $100 for a 20-minute show. The drive-through set-up has become popular with couples,
groups of women, and college students -- people who may not
want to spend $15 or $20 for admission to the club, or who
feel more comfortable in their cars than in the group
environment of a strip club. And, of course, there's more
privacy in a car than in a club -- an advantage to couples
and singles alike. A Massive Disruption of the
Current Social Order "What a massive disruption of the current social order... This effectively decrees the end of all morals legislation. If, as the Court asserts, the promotion of majoritarian sexual morality is not even a legitimate state interest, none of the above-mentioned laws [laws against fornication, bigamy, masturbation, adultery, prostitution, adult incest, bestiality, and obscenity] can survive rational-basis review." -- Justice Antonin Scalia, dissenting from the majority ruling in Lawrence v. Texas, June 26, 2003 It could have been "just" a gay rights decision. It could have been nothing more than a decision ordering that homosexuals be treated equally with heterosexuals when it comes to state regulation of sexual practices. It could have been a ruling that the state of Texas could only outlaw sodomy between homosexuals if it applied those restrictions to heterosexuals as well. That in itself would have been historic, a major victory for gay and lesbian rights after 17 years of legal campaigning, a cause for special celebration in gay pride events across the country. But that's not what the Supreme Court chose to say on June 26 when it issued its anxiously awaited decision in Lawrence v. Texas. Instead, the Court chose to go much further than affirming the right of gays and lesbians to have sex on an equal basis with heterosexuals. Instead, the Court decided to challenge the very idea that government has any right whatsoever to tell consenting adults of all sexual orientations and all sexual inclinations how they may or may not have sex in the privacy of their homes. "Were we to hold the [Texas prohibition of sodomy] invalid under the Equal Protection Clause," Justice Anthony Kennedy writes in his remarkable majority opinion, "some might question whether a prohibition would be valid if drawn differently, say, to prohibit [sodomy] both between same-sex and different-sex participants." No, says Kennedy for the Court. The state has no business attempting "to define the meaning of the [sexual] relationship or set its boundaries." None at all, for consenting adults, unless there is "injury to a person or abuse of an institution the law protects." Why? Because, Kennedy says with more sexual appreciation than anyone could possibly expect from the inner sanctums of established government, it is essential that adults be able to "choose to enter upon this relationship [sex] in the confines of their homes and their own private lives and still retain their dignity as free persons." The venerable Sexual Freedom League could not have said it better. Kennedy goes on to issue a veritable treatise on the importance of sex in human relations, and the history of sexual attitudes and legal constraints in this country. He cites the brilliant and radical work of John D'Emilio and Estelle Freedman ("Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America"). He notes that 19th-century sodomy prosecutions typically involved sex between adults and children, "predatory acts against those who could not or did not consent," not oral or anal sex between adults. He emphasizes that, prior to the 1970s, homosexuals were never singled out for criminal prosecution, that the very "concept of the homosexual as a distinct category of person did not emerge until the late 19th century." He notes the dramatic changes in sexual attitudes that have occurred since the 1960s and cites these in defense of his ruling. "Our laws and traditions in the past half century are of most relevance here," says Kennedy -- the "emerging awareness that liberty gives substantial protection to adult persons in deciding how to conduct their private lives in matters pertaining to sex." Laws that "purport to do no more than prohibit a sexual act" actually "have more far-reaching consequences," Kennedy observes, "touching upon the most private human conduct, sexual behavior, and in the most private of places, the home." Sex is so fundamental a part of human relationships, says Kennedy, that, in the name of basic liberty, the state must leave individuals free to pursue it however they please. To do otherwise subjects individuals to a stigma that is "not trivial," he says, including the requirement that they register as sex offenders in at least four states. Sex, Kennedy philosophizes in the passage most widely cited in media reports, is much more significant than the performance of a specific act. "When sexuality finds overt expression in intimate conduct with another person, the conduct can be but one element in a personal bond that is more enduring." The issue of sexual freedom, he says, is nothing less than one's "right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life." Then Kennedy really gets down to brass tacks. "The issue is whether the majority may use the power of the State to enforce [its 'religious beliefs, conceptions of right and acceptable behavior, and respect for the traditional family'] on the whole society through operation of criminal law." It may not, Kennedy declares unequivocally. "Our obligation is to define the liberty of all, not to mandate our own moral code." John Geddes Lawrence and Tyron Garner, the publicity-shunning appellants in Lawrence v. Texas, have the right to engage in sex however they please, without the intrusion of the state, says Kennedy, not only because homosexuals should be equal in standing to heterosexuals, but more fundamentally because "individual decisions by [both married and unmarried] persons, concerning the intimacies of their physical relationship, even when not intended to produce offspring, are a form of liberty protected by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment." "Keep Your Laws Off My Body" reads the decades-old slogan that gay rights activists and sexual crusaders of all stripes have emblazoned on hundreds of thousands of protest signs, t-shirts, and bumper stickers. Anthony Kennedy could appropriately have been wearing just such a t-shirt under his judicial robes when he delivered his majority opinion, speaking for five of the nine Supreme Court Justices. (Sandra Day O'Connor, the sixth vote in the Court's 6-3 decision, restricted her concurrence to the issue of equal rights for homosexuals.) Just as Brown v. Board of Education profoundly changed the legal standing of African-Americans in 1954, just as Roe v. Wade radically altered the circumstances of women in 1973, so does Lawrence v. Texas completely redefine the ongoing struggle for sexual freedom, autonomy, and self-determination in this country. The ruling is unambiguous, unrelenting, unqualified, and crystal clear. No group in society -- no matter how fervent, no matter how large -- has the right to impose its views about how people should and should not have sex on everyone else. Scalia is right. All laws prohibiting fornication, masturbation, adultery, playing with sex toys, attending private swingers parties and s/m clubs, prostitution, bigamy, adult incest, bestiality, and obscenity must now be called into question and arguably overturned. Everyone who has long believed something along those lines need no longer feel the slightest bit hesitant to say so. It's not just a bunch of fringe perverts who believe in the importance of sexual freedom and self-determination, it's the majority of a very conservative United States Supreme Court. "Two adults who, with full and mutual consent from each other [engage in sex] are entitled to respect for their private lives. The State cannot demean their existence or control their destiny by making their private sexual conduct a crime." Social conservatives from Antonin Scalia to Jerry Falwell are stunned and angered by the Court's decision, as well they ought to be. Just when they thought they had the Supreme Court in their hip pocket, look what happens. "This is probably as bad a day as the court has had on social issues since Roe v. Wade," Falwell told The New York Times. "A grand-slam homer for the other side," bemoaned Jay Sekulow of Pat Robertson's American Center for Law and Justice. Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA), who created a major conundrum for George Bush with his remarks about the case prior to the June 26 decision, was quick to say I-told-you-so. Tom Minnery of Focus on the Family, accused the Court of "pillaging its way through the moral norms of our country." But while social conservatives go apoplectic and scurry around drafting constitutional amendments to prevent Lawrence v. Texas from turning the tables in the ongoing debate about gay marriage, libertarian |
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