Creation is Creation is Creation: I Won’t Hush About What Gets Me There

April 8, 2017 by

Photo by Sarah Paterson

When one decides to support a creator how much control do they believe they’ve acquired over the artist’s life? Entitlement is a thorny mess, and there is a lot of confusion about how and why creators create…

Every now and then someone shows up and tells me all of the things they think I’m doing wrong — as if I haven’t carefully made decisions about my career, or as if actively believing in something other than the status quo is an indication of a deep confusion on my part. I think it’s important to hear this voice when it pops up, but I also consider it a certain type of violence upon me and my life as a creator. It pricks at the parts of me informed by being a female-enculturated person, a queer, and an artist because through those vantage points I already struggle every day to find my voice despite the onslaught of loud suggestions demanding that I live differently and be different. I could be doing a million more steady and lucrative things than being a queer performance artist, however in the interests of my mental health, my tolerability as a human being, my hard-wired passions, and my love for my real-life communities, I use all that I have to say what I believe. Recently I received a letter from someone adamant that this very blog shouldn’t be a part of my Patreon campaign. In essence they wrote that I should only make money off of certain pieces of my art and not others to be an artist worthy of their support. This person had seen me perform live years ago and they found my patreon, they pledged to support my campaign and remained a faithful supporter for all of 3 days. I don’t decry that in the least, I completely understand changing one’s mind or reconsidering. However, this person took it upon themselves to write a long and accusatory letter scolding me for writing about sexuality and doing the art that I do (which I have always done) which wasn’t explicitly “character acting for stage”. In the letter the person didn’t ask me a single question about what my goals are as an artist or what projects I am currently working on, and they made broad sweeping judgements about how I would never amount to anything if I continue to talk about my experiences as a queer, gender-fluid, kinky, pro-choice artist — that instead I should just “become more mainstream” in order to succeed. Sufficed to say, the letter was a bizarre, badly edited, jumble of heated accusatory emotions which left me thinking that my work must have hit a rather personal nerve somewhere.

A bit about my Patreon campaign: My artist support page says quite clearly that I intend on posting paid content 4-6 times a month, and that my posts are mainly fed from my ABCs Of Kink blog. This blog is the only “content creation” type of work that I do, and so its existence helps me monetize my entire artistic career as I write it. This blog is the “day job” I have created for myself which allows me to build all of my other art. Through Patreon I also release the occasional script or video of my theatrical work, which are usually not available to the general public. Regardless of what I publish 6 times a month though, published content is what pays my bills and it is the only steady income stream that I currently have. A lot of people are very interested in supporting this blog (thank you!). They find comfort and interest in my frank discussions about sexuality, kink, identity, and related matters. People also enjoy paying to take classes with me to learn about creativity, performance, exploring identity, and to pick up BDSM skills. I was recently on a tour performing my newly created solo show, NO SHAME, which premiered at and won an award at the Asheville Fringe Festival. On that tour I also performed at other events and taught kink skill classes to make ends meet. It is only because I am making a minimum amount of money through Patreon that I have the freedom to write and produce theater and tour my work. Counting for people who cap their donations, after fees and cuts are taken I make around $350-$375 a month from this job. This (barely) covers the bills I have to pay each month for insurance, debt, and business expenses. I hope it continues growing, and I’m grateful for what it already affords me. Considering the expenses involved with touring a show, and that pay for performances is extremely low, without also teaching kink and theater classes while on tour I wouldn’t be able to pay for gas to get from theater gig to theater gig. This speaks nothing of hotel bills, car fixes and upkeep, parking, cafe-for-internet charges, actual meal eating, personal necessities, and other road expenses, and it certainly doesn’t cover spending that’s fun or helpful for networking. This blog also helps me find paying participants for my classes!

I am the artist. The career that I grow must be one which allows what I believe to be said as it makes sense to me. These are my creations. They couldn’t exist without me. You can’t truly value one part of what I do without understanding that the work you may like less is still intricately a part of how I came to create the work you most enjoy.

I was told in this letter just how tragically talented I am — if only I’d just perform on Broadway like Lily Tomlin did with her solo show (what have I been thinking?!)! I also take enormous issue that this person defined my fans as garbage, and said that I should be seeking a higher quality of appreciation, implying that by remaining an artist who talks about sexuality and my own exploratory experiences, I was relegating my career to the annals of low-brow coulda-been-ery when what the world really needs is more talented, smart, character actors who will STFU about the ways they’re personally oppressed when they’re not precisely in one place: in character on stage.

It’s evident this person’s missed the entire point of my body of work over the past 20+ years as a professional teaching artist who consistently and specifically focuses on gender, sexuality, inequality, identity, and queerness. I work hard to be privileged enough to be out in a number of ways, and I consider it my responsibility to talk openly about all of these issues as they’ve affected me, so that those less able to feel safe, and those more oppressed or repressed than I am can find refuge from some of their struggles, or a deeper level of self-acceptance. My art, my POV, my garbagey low-brow filthy mouth, body, brain, and typing fingers are the tools I have always intentionally used to act against this brand of erasure and tyrannical oppression. I refuse to be quiet for the status quo’s comfort. My support of people’s identities, my loud mouth, and my critique of the status quo is in service of world peace through self-actualization. Hush money won’t work here, nor will the intoxicant effects of a fairytale story called “Fame” the world keeps trying to sell me. If any version of my art ever moved you, you should also understand that I was only able to make that piece of art because at some point in my life I was given permission to be who I am, and I will not move backwards from where I now stand, and I will enact as best as I can that same service to others who are struggling.

Yes, I am a trained and talented performance artist and character actor. The queer community deserves good actors on their stages, and while I welcome straight and mainstream patrons into my performance spaces, my voice is not for sale or negotiation. Please invite me to be me on your monied mainstream stage, but if you think I’m going to be more socially acceptable there than I have been (and still am) in the gritty off-lit environments of my drag and underground theater temples, you’re just plain wrong. Sure, I perform family friendly shows too — BECAUSE I AM WHOLE. No one has the right to distill me into parts or ask me to choose one part of my existence over another to build a career entirely catered to their comfort. Every overprotective parent afraid of the day they’ll have to address “the birds and the bees” with their kiddo got there because of sex. We are all the products of hormonal desire and the messiness of our emotions mixed with primordial goo. My career is dynamic and appropriate to my audience, just like I believe it is supposed to be.

The characters I create are summoned from my politics and my struggles within this culture which asks me to be other than I am. I have been a professional performer since age 11 and have worked in every facet of theater imaginable in the 28 years since. I am currently in Boston gigging for a month as director of a show, and I can do this because I have committed everything to this career, and I have enough experience to be versatile about how my artistic voice is produced. My current artistic goal, now that I’ve created my solo show, is to tour it as I have opportunity to do so, but also I have other goals. I want to find a home and I want to build an artspace to work out of in a number of ways. I need a certain amount of money and a regular more substantial paycheck to accomplish that. It is one of the things I am steadily working on from a number of angles. I am proficient in performance and writing, I am not proficient in booking gigs and theater management. I would love to be booking more college gigs for pay, and to be engaged in theater tours, sure! If someone wants to tell me I’m doing everything wrong, please do — but then hook me up with a booking manager who is interested in facilitating these opportunities. I have a lengthy catalog of material ready for stage and am a passionate workshop teacher and lecturer at the high school, college, and adult community levels…

I want to thank you, friends, readers, and fans: I find satisfaction and deep fulfillment from performing my work on the stage, from teaching, from writing and also from being in conversation with people who want help opening up to their own sense of self. My fans are not few and far between desperate weirdos. I have touched people through my work as a gender performer, a sex and kink writer, a character actor, dancer, documentary subject, lifelong emerging identity champion, and friend. I have shifted my situation in the last year to facilitate the blooming of my art, and am struggling to make it work. I am struggling, but I am also doing it. I am listening to where there is money to be made within my paradigm of interest so that I can become more grounded doing exactly those things. Do I wish I was more grounded in my life right now? Yes I do. Historically artists who spend most of their time making art have had to diversify their focus to survive. This has meant everything from taking a larger percentage of commissioned work, or marrying into money, to being “kept” by various artistic patrons within understood agreements, or already having money from a family source or elsewhere. This struggle has coined the term “starving artist” we so love to fetishize, and has added names to the ever growing list of people who died poor yet made their inheritors wealthy. I will build my life as I have to, to be the person that I am. I have no intention to cut away any of my proclivities in that endeavor, and I intend on making my money how I need to to continue to make the art that is in me to make. The world has told me every day since my birth to be lesser than I am, and it is exactly through the outrage I have at that very proposal that I find drive, that I find my writing voice, and that I find the characters who even these entitlement minded naysayers purport to be moved by. My fire is not cold because I will not let it become so. The solo show I have written for Broadway, and for every stage, is entitled “NO SHAME” for a reason.

This is what my life/career looks like:

  • I write this blog! It is the only thing that currently pays me regularly. Thank you for supporting me for it if you do! I literally couldn’t survive and create at the rate I am able to without this group of supporters at my back.
  • I gig where I can find gigs: drag, burlesque, solo show performance, storytelling, special appearances, character acting, performance art, clown, dance, spoken word, kink/BDSM performance, and right now I’m in Boston directing a circus show!…
  • I teach workshops and classes and privates, as well as present lectures and serve on panels. I am hired by individuals, couples, groups, conventions, and universities to do this work in a number of subjects ranging from the creative process, to acting, movement, storytelling, cultivating presence, performance skills, kink skills, BDSM knowhow, relationship skills, queer identities, drag, and gender exploration…
  • I build, direct, and manage everything you see me doing — costumes, choreography, booking management, tour schedules, script writing, curriculum writing, props, set pieces, tech design, submission proposals, grant applications, research, web design and upkeep, content research, personal research, editing, promotion, tour driving… (this is a non-exhaustive list).
  • I create content for my Patrons every week outside of what I publish: photos, journal entries about what I’m up to or have been thinking about, videos, personal appeals, script sharing…
  • I cultivate and keep up with many relationships all over the country — personal and creative contacts — because that’s part of the hustle of being an artist, but even more importantly it’s something that brings me pleasure and returns to me love and support when (deities forbid) I experience days ladden with the fearful or exhausted heart of a human creature, rather than the tireless and impenetrable drive of a robot.
  • I eat cabbage, bread, avocados, lentils, and vegan butter when I’m buying the groceries, and I try to make that food stretch. I exercise a little every day. I perform centering rituals and chip away at my writing practice every day. I have very few “days off”, and to date every “vacation” I’ve ever had I’ve turned into a secluded work retreat in order to create content I don’t have the time to focus on when I’m not “on vacation”.
  • I am homeless right now, meaning I am able to survive off such a small income because I am privileged to be offered couches and spare mattresses by a large number of family and friends across the country who open their homes to me when I am in town a few days, weeks, or months at a time.
  • I pay bills and field financial problems as they arise just like everybody else does, but I don’t have much of a margin in which to do so. I deal with problems and I struggle to make it all work. I hustle to figure out my options.
  • I win some days and I fail utterly on others. I pick up the pieces, try to learn to be better than my failures, celebrate when I can, and I move on.

I am a kink writer, a drag king and burlesquer, a teacher, a dancer, a character actor, a performance artist, an activist, a queer, someone not afraid to talk about sex and identity, a connection-driven creator, and a clown. My story is important. My story isn’t being written by the plethora of white men producing dead white men’s plays for white theater companies supported by white money in this country — and I am privileged to be white in that equation. Imagine telling someone without whiteness on their side to just focus on “fitting in” with their art (well, more than we do every single day already)…

Thank you.  Thank you to every fan who’s written me telling me not to give up. Thank you to every person who’s told me that my work has helped them find their own way in this lifetime. Thank you to every queer kid who smiled when I had the honor of teaching them how to tie their first tie, and to every privileged cishet white guy who’s humbly told me my words, performances, or classes have helped them understand something they were having a hard time grasping. Thank you to all the choir I’ve been preaching to who’ve choreographed and co-produced and rehearsed and partied in solidarity — ’cause talking out loud about the obvious shit’s the only thing to do in this world of blind eyes! I don’t need you to pay me if you think supporting my talent means you own me — money could never dominate all of what I’ve got anyhow. I want you to pay me because you believe in me as a human being with a mind worth listening to, and I hope you understand that my survival and the survival of artists who aren’t nearly as privileged as I am, when we’re supported to speak up about our own truths, are incredibly valuable assets to this world. It takes a lot of moxie to make these creations that you like. Ask questions and be humble about the parts you don’t understand: they’re part of the magic of creation in the first place.

Play On My Friends,
~ Karin

If you like my blog, please check out my Patreon Page and support me. For one time donations click here: Support the Artist

~Thank you.

Filed Under: Perspectives on Kink Blog Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Adult Playground

February 3, 2017 by

Still from “NO SHAME”. Photo by Jennifer Bennett

I’m in the middle of an East Coast tour performing my solo show, NO SHAME, I’m appearing in a few other shows, and teaching workshops along the way to help pay for food, gas and expenses. Like this blog, my message across mediums is about finding and owning one’s self. NO SHAME is a shapeshifting half-hour event where I tackle stereotypes, the metamorphosis of one’s character and identity over time, what it’s like to be institutionally afraid to be out in the world, and the intersection of these experiences with the power of thought and the force one’s words. The piece is essentially about the will to be.

Today more than any time in my life I think, the words that we dare to use, artist’s messages from all over, having conversations about taboo subjects, and the willingness of individuals to claim their space and speak up against oppression, against repression, and against the narrowing of ideas into boxes easily manipulated and controlled by the elite (political and/or wealthy), are enormously important. We must feed ourselves, as we would be further starved by the system. Continuing to gather reliable and objective intelligence, community building through acknowledgement of need and actioning to provide, choosing observation and action over despair or overwhelm, cultivating openness to new and different POVs, and the use of questioning instead of attack: these are tools for change, vital in this historical moment we are sinking into like the swamp of sadness… We must move our blood. We must speak, exercise, be!

I am teaching workshops in kink skills — a smattering of rope classes, my “Radical Gender Theater” curriculum, and an intro to various types of kink play pertaining to sensation manipulation. I’ve had the pleasure of teaching groups as well as privates; the classes are meant to empower people to better communicate with one another, and help navigate through the vulnerability that desire requires through fun, curiosity, challenge, and skilled playfulness. This “adult playground” we have matured into having control over (our bodies, emotions, and minds), is a gift we get only one chance to live well within.

Human animals are capable of far more than we recognise or are taught. Having been enculturated as a female person, and eventually finding kink — rough body play, needles, bites, whip marks, and scratches — has proven to me over and over again that my body is resilient and capable of processing pain and healing from damaging activity in a way my perceived gender is institutionally protected from finding or knowing. Having been surrounded by the sensitivities and open expression of emotions, pains, fears, and lostness of those enculturated within the masculine lie proves to me too that us animals are whole underneath. It is the powers that be, not the world which would have us be lesser than our true potential strengths and understandings.

I love my art. I love my audience and my students. When I act out or speak up, I learn so much about what people see and feel in response. I want to be an affecting force. I want to help people reach their inner truths and desires against the powers that be. I want to exercise this animal body, this universal intellect, this natural heart to their purposes while I live.

Play On My Friends,
~ Karin

If you like my blog, please check out my Patreon Page and support me. For one time donations click here: Support the Artist

~Thank you.

Filed Under: Brain on Download Blog Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Identity Stories

November 27, 2016 by

My Identity is a series of stories I haven’t pieced together yet, and I never fully will.

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Thank you Veris Meyer-Wilde for the flier design, and Jonathan Beckley and Rachel Leah Blumenthal for the photos

My Identity when I was young was often reds and tans and warm colors all around.

My Identity at nine was momentary red cheeks, shamed for struggling to put a sports bra on for the first time; pulling it on awkwardly from the feet up backstage in public. Other dance kid’s mothers looked disapprovingly on at my illiterate struggle with the things of a girl. I was told “never do that again”, embarrassment filling my face as I blinked the tears away and erased that moment with adrenaline dancing on stage. I didn’t want to wear it anyway, even though I was mortified by my puffy areolas and awkwardly budding breasts.

My Identity had been red fire-spitting anger and deep aching years earlier. 7 years old. Before I had breasts or other markers of a what-you-want-to-call-it body I was told I had to start wearing a shirt when I was in the summer sun outside. Told this by my father, shirtless himself, covered in dirt and tan in the garden working next to me. I bitterly went about the deed of covering up and never lost desire for my body’s bare skin in the sun.

My Identity was warm rust-red corduroy jeans, stitches attaching a tag picturing cowboys on the back, age 5. I thought I was so tough, so fine! I loved those pants, they made me feel like me when a lot of things made me feel disappeared like I thought I was supposed to be.

My IDENTITY, age 4: threatened and sexually manipulated by an older boy I liked. Escaping from the terrible situation, anxiety through the roof, and then punished for being out of my bed… It sticks with me, This Identity. I still don’t know how to feel safe with most people I like. I have a hard time trusting it will end up ok. I worry I’ll get in trouble or that I’m always doing something wrong. I don’t fight or flight, mainly I freeze and exist elsewhere…

  • Letting someone know I like them is so hard for me to do
  • Saying no follows close behind
  • It takes a lot of time
  • Embracing that I’m a survivor helped me know how to deal with my presentness in the midst of feeling terror and/or turned on
  • After years of struggle I’m still getting clearer

My Identity sneaked a lot. Quiet very early mornings exploring the knife drawer (and paying for it in cuts and blood), finding candy on a high shelf and trying not to make a noticeable dent while “tasting”. Makeup and hairspray packed secretly to school with me and I defiantly put it on in the Jr. High School bathroom. Put it on horribly… Oof my identity. I felt like I needed to be “a girl who looked good”, and I thought looking good meant make-up. I felt so uncomfortable with it on my face and in my hair; being seen like that — weird bad girl-drag in public and I didn’t even pass. I got called out by kids for looking awkward as I tried to fit in like they were doing so perfectly. Eventually I stopped trying and figured out how to comfortably wear me. I let my face be clean, probably mostly reading “dykey woman” to the world, even as my boy face sometimes likes eyeliner and a little tan color on the cheeks when he dresses up. Lipstick still never makes sense to me. Luckily I am a theatrical artist, and I can let my drag be drag; my characters tell me how they want me to gussy up for them, and I can hide behind my Clown Identity when bad make-up makes it to the stage.

My Identity was wrestling with boys and always winning for years through adulthood. I stopped that in large part when I embraced BDSM and Kink. Being punched kicks a cooler set of chemicals into my blood, and the people I play those games with don’t get as frustrated ’cause everyone leaves victorious. I feel lucky and like an equal when I get chosen to receive.

My Identity watched my father shave when I was a kid, so excited to have facial hair myself someday! I was crushed at the realization it wasn’t going to happen… Though who knows, I do want to take T.

My Identity also wished I would grow up to be a unicorn. It was every wish I made as a kid — “because I could be anything”. My young self was sure I’d have a bump on my forehead by the time I hit puberty and I was disgusted with life when I realized that it was never going to happen. Fuck the fourth grade.

My Identity is a lifetime of having biracial family. I care about friends, colleagues, and role models who have skin colors, nationalities, and ethnicities which are not predominantly european/white like my own. I learn every day to better love these people with struggles I can know about but cannot know. I also struggle to understand how to embrace the not dominant parts of me that are not-white, because I don’t look not-white. I’ve spent a lot of years listening, considering my internal emotional reactions to new thoughts, learning from and questioning the space I stand in concerning privilege, questioning what to do with the privileges that I have in this world… I’m not done.

My Identity is thoroughly and completely used to being rejected and admonished, used as an example and embarrassed by religious folk. Even family on Thanksgiving. I’ve been put down for not having Jesus Christ as my saviour, and been unable to engage mythologically or philosophically at the table without being made to feel defensive from personal attack. “Born Again” bizzarro meaning-making has trumped my words and ideas about how to find goodness in humanity outside of organized worship… I’ve been harassed by friends who wanted to convert me, and thrown away/disowned/cut off by family who will not accept the queer love beating in the center of me.

My Identity when I was younger, on a basic level didn’t know what “no” meant, because my no, when I said it at 4, hadn’t created a stop. It was run over and backed up on and sarcastically negotiated with before being picked up, violated, and punted out of sight. “No” begs me ask questions. I want a clearer understanding of meanings, wishes, desires, and dissatisfactions going on behind the scenes, attached to the word and moment. Hearing “no” can feel like opening the doors on a fancy grand ballroom I have never been in before — there is so much to look at and I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing and I can’t stop staring at things and asking questions about what they are. I’ve learned this is not generally the conversation someone telling me to stop wants to hear in response… Now I know what it means, though I still sometimes feel lost on the road of knowing what (after stopping) next to offer or do.

My Identity would come home from a show, and numerous times has had partners turned on by the male drag or female drag or any number of character masks I walked in within. I secretly have perseverated on and worried that the heightened personas I was wearing were more attractive than I was underneath. Worried my identity will never be as stimulating as the lines I draw on my face, wigs I don, and other people’s clothing I put on — to look like identities other people recognize, desire, and accept.

My Identity fears it cannot be seen, though in reality I think my friends sometimes see and accept me more easily than I see or understand myself. There is a special blindness caused by not seeing yourself in culture everyday, celebrated on TV, depicted on billboards and in magazines, or even clearly championed in the safe-spaces one seeks out to feel free, that I am afflicted by. I think it’s probably a good thing — a reason why I think and critique artistically — but I mostly don’t exist comfortably or easily.

My Identity dressed in the trappings of high femme-ininity feels dumb and inadequate. When I put on those shenanigans I am often disappointed and even angered by the people who compliment me more, smile at me more, buy me drinks, or touch me and speak intimately with me after shows without asking. My everyday dress and presentation isn’t a hetero-normatively acceptable or popular display of “female” which I am often assumed to be (nor do I feel particularly feminine), so when I slide into a more femme look, with stockings and sparkles and skirts and bras and wigs, and I am immediately handed that mixed bag of privilege-and-abuse which (while I enjoy looking in the mirror at the charade) also makes me feel alone and all-wrong and invisible and objectified and insignificant next to this “look’s” obvious priority. If I were a girl-identifying-girl I don’t know if I’d feel differently. Who I am is a fish out of water dressed this way, people’s opinions aside… And on top of the internal argument quietly happening, I experience a rush of those sub-conscious teachings I’ve gathered through the years and worked to peel away piling back on me. I start to feel like the real me, without this femme costume on must be shameful and ultimately ugly. I re-feel the crisis-creating dirty impulse to hate what I have, who I am, and who inside I want to be.

My Identity feels so fucking powerful onstage — sharing myself fully, deeply, authentically, and nakedly with a room full of people who know they should not touch me — it doesn’t even matter if I’m in the clothes of another or not. My presence on my terms in front of humans who want to be there and will let me lay out the rules of the evening. Being a Performance Artist makes calm powerful playful fun consensual safe outrageous anything can happen it’s going to be ok sense to me.

My Identity read “The Leather Daddy and the Femme” by Carol Queen, and for the first time absolutely understood what being turned on by erotica meant! I felt my sexually submissive side come alive and knew I wasn’t alone in my fantasies of gay leather culture, Tom of Finland, for some reason ok with my cunt, deeply desiring to be Mastered as somebody’s boy…

My Identity enjoys the freedom and feeling of dresses (it still just wants to be naked) and feels like a tomboy regardless of what I put on. I feel like I’m in costume or in drag as my dress gets more “appropriate” or “girly” or “straight passing”. Give me high fashion dresses and designer heels, and with a sculpted haircut I’ll bind my breasts to match — those looks play with feminine as its own righteous narrative story. Power inside of drapery. The boy me really likes those clothes and I enjoy this not-a-girl feeling of femininity.

My Identity has been told by countless Butches over the years that they just see me as “a girl”, not androgynous or butch enough to be like them. Especially by the ones who’ve been attracted to me.

My Identity has been told by a quadrant of lesbians that the variety of people I fuck and feel makes me wrong, dangerous, a fake, worthless, unloveable, unfriendable, and not welcome or ok.

My Identity has been told by scores of gay men that I’m meant to be nurturing and not sexy and my cunt is fishy; that I do not deserve to exist in the world because they do not [sexually or otherwise] need me.

My Identity has been told some version of that last one over and over by all types of men my whole life…

My Identity was pressured and coerced during social and sexual situations many times growing up and through adulthood. By men mainly. Men who are cis, though there were a few trans ones in the mix and a Butch or two reminding me that misogyny is equal opportunity. My identity sometimes doesn’t know how to navigate my attraction to dominance with my sexual trauma from childhood. Who am I if I don’t do what I’m supposed to do? What is my worth? How do I get this one right for anybody?… And I most often click with other submissive people in relationship — not historically the most rewarding or satisfying combination sexually.

My Identity often just wants to be collared and treated like a cat. No, really.

My Identity likes a pat on the head. So even though it’s more depressing, some days I choose passing.

My Identity has often been labeled “femme” by others even though that has nothing — NO thing — to do with how I feel in my body. I have never even once wanted to be thought of as femme (and I love and celebrate femmes), I’m just not one of them. It makes me want to scream and punch, and I get embarrassed really quickly when I’m called that or am treated that way; I don’t even know how to be in the room any longer — in part because I realize, clearly, that “I” am not.

My Identity my whole life gets called “lady” in restaurants and by random people who shouldn’t be calling me anything, and has fired back numerous times:”I’ve never been a lady, and I don’t think I’ll start being one today”. Lately though, since moving to the South it happens so frequently I find myself not saying anything at all. Why? Because I’m afraid; because I don’t want to make the people I’m with uncomfortable; because I’m not used to it being such a normative norm, and because I don’t trust Southerners to understand (as I do the Northerners or Coastal people); because I feel my identity around others — my self-ness — is a dangerous imposition to claim. I break my own heart every time in that silence.

My Identity intersects with family whose gender is named “interesting”. It flirts with ex-lovers who have been butch, trans, fluid, and androgynous. It is informed by so many friends who are trans and on their various three-dimensional journeys through everything… I have spent years quietly asking myself if I am even allowed to identify as something other than that space I’ve held for others over a lifetime? I’ve been “the girl” in relationship and in the world as a comfort service, I’ve played that role as an act of submission to a universe who hasn’t cared to ask me who I am. It has felt good to make my masculine-of-center partners, friends, and family feel visible and valued as different from me, or my feminine-of-center partners, friends, family feel comfortable, loved, and empowered as similar to me… but it isn’t my inside feeling of self at all.

My Identity lit up the first time I heard the term “social dysphoria“. I don’t have much physical dysphoria when it comes to gender, but that other one, oof! Yeah, I’ll take two. Dysphoria has nothing to do with transness at all, but it was the first time I had words for what I actually do feel and it helped me know that my feelings were ok.

My Identity often tells people I might play with that I’m kink-sexual rather than sex-sexual. It’s the safe thing to do so that I don’t have to deal with the messiness of sexual coercion or disappointments or wrestling with myself later to say the no I mean now but don’t know if I’m safe yet to say… And it’s “pat”. I like pat, but sometimes I feel like I’m betraying my rabidly sexual side because of always being afraid first. Upfront cock-cunt-or-junk-blocking is easier than disappointing, but when our connection warms up, I don’t actually know how I’ll feel. In truth the thing that turns me on most is not having sex expected from me at all, so I guess this plan works even though it seems like throwing up a wall. I’ve learned it’s ok to get there a lot slower than I used to.

My Identity breathes easier because in my old age I’ve found more and more beautiful people who gracefully and playfully accept and celebrate my boundaries and definitions of me.

My Identity goes something like:

  1. a submissive masochistic playful boy wanting a SirLady/Daddy/Mommy/Queer-ass Kinky Family
  2. androgynous sensual sometimes animal rough-and-tumble creature-body, and
  3. powerful Artistic Woman who doesn’t want to hold that space in bed for most yet thoroughly enjoys saving Menstrual Blood in a bottle for spells against the Patriarchy, calling out misogyny, loving on other Women, and tasting/feeling/fucking/pleasing pussy.

My Gender is:

  • Creature/imp
  • boy
  • Woman

And I am so many things, but of note I like these:

  • photo-on-11-27-16-at-12-46-pm-6Boy on a runway in a skirt and heels
  • Feline
  • Connection Slut
  • Experimentalist
  • Sensualist
  • Shapeshifter
  • Grandpa
  • Artist
  • Genuine
  • Courageous
  • Karin
  • Me

To Breath and Being,
~ Karin

If you like my blog, please check out my Patreon Page and consider supporting me, or for one time donations, click this link: Support the Artist

~Thank you.

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