The School of Fuck.

There was an image I had in my head. In it, I was on stage, fresh-as-dew, dressed like a professional, moving around briskly and with just enough animation to be an engaging instructor. Instead, I found myself seated at a tiny little desk that had to be placed on stage, because I had torn a tendon in my ankle the previous day, I was sweating from head-to-toe as the stage-lights wore me down and while I was wearing a tie, the accompanying pigtails and undershirt were more thrift-store aficionado than consummate professional. The stage, after all, despite its roots of pancake make-up and fantastical theatricity, is a place of truth and truth is rarely conveyed well through an image.

To understand the truth of that moment, we have to go eleven-years into the past to when I met one of my closest friends. I had just moved to Delhi, from Mumbai, after a brief stint of attempting to be an investment banker, which was an unusual choice for a former sex-worker and activist, but not so strange for a finance-major, which I also was. It seemed like it was time to be a different type of whore, but I couldn’t stand how boring it was to work with money. It was the cheapest kind of thrill, betting on numbers to watch them go up and down, corporate careers have a way of making you feel so immersed in the internecine mundanities, you truly start to believe they comprise the entire world. Very quickly, I realised I was in the wrong place, I enrolled in journalism-school, found a job and got the fuck out of there before I had even unpacked all my stuff (which is really only a testament to how long I’ll live out of a suitcase). In this new city, one that I had been warned against my entire life for its hostility towards women and its superficiality, I found myself in a state of mind I did not expect. I found myself happy, like I had come home.

Home was a terrible place—dingy, unsafe, unfamiliar—but it was so interesting and full of possibility, it made me want to stay. I had little time to pursue friendships (and limited comprehension of the concept) and little inclination to return to bars to find partners to fuck, so I looked to the internet for social connection and that is where I found him, on a fetish site that I had resisted for years. We both got off work at the same absurd hour and that was the only factor I considered before I invited him home. Recently, he told me that before he had come over, I had asked him not to rape me, I don’t remember doing this, but I do know I did it to all the men I invited home back then. I even did it to my spouse when I first met him. Not only did he not rape me, he would also go on to become my first and to this day, only, truly platonic friend. I feel no desire to fuck him. I keep joking that even when I am holding his dick, it’s not a sexual thing at all, if you walked into a room and he was inside me, it would still be akin to a handshake. Instead, we began a relationship that had two significant components.

Art and dreams.

I know how that sounds but bear with me. He hated reading and I hate watching films, but we both enjoy identifying and learning the elemental aspects of creation, and we speak the same language when it comes to that. I started reiterating books to him and he told me the stories of film, not the plots, mythos will always rank bottom as an element of drama for me, he would tell me about films like he had made them, like he understood their construction, and I would tell him about books in the same way and that made those inaccessible forms of expression, accessible to both of us. For years, we knew nothing about each other, but we knew each other’s dreams. I was going to write beautiful books of astonishing porn one day and he was going to find the art in erotic film. We were going to do it out loud, let the entire world see our faces, because only then, had we truly transcended all the societal and familial restraints that made us afraid of being ourselves. Just two kids, all of twenty-one, sitting in an apartment smaller than my kitchen is now, and dreaming their strange dreams.

You’d have to look a lot closer to understand what those dreams meant to us.

While I was growing up, my sexuality was the hardest battle I had to fight, it made no sense, it arrived too early, it made me do things, I learnt the world through it and I was repeatedly targeted, attacked and assaulted for it. At one point, I made the conscious choice to be deliberately loud about being sexual, instead of being found out, I decided I was going to make a dedicated effort towards understanding myself and annihilating the crypt-like silence that surrounded all things sexual. There is a cost associated with that. When you get older and you relegate yourself to sex-and-kink positive spaces, you forget how hard it once was to stand before the world and proclaim your identity, there is a reason why the majority of sex-leaders in India exist as shadow-selves, or move out of the country, fiercely guarding their identity lest they be found out and facing a tremendous amount of backlash from general society, and I do not begrudge anyone that, I understand why it’s not possible for many to be known as themselves by their neighbours and their families.

In that world, my friend and I, envisioned spaces where we could delve with abandon into the nexus of art, sex and madness. For many years, he did what he could with an advocacy group and I wrote. Wherever I could find the space to deconstruct sexuality, I wrote. For the first six-seven years, the majority of my readers remained non-Indian, still, alongside my day job, I pitched one sex column after another to anyone who would let me send them an e-mail. It went nowhere, until three years ago, when a reasonably well-known media platform decided to pick it up for a year. In the past three years, I have written (under my real name) about a tyrannical government, sexual harassment in the armed forces, abortion law and even then, I have never received as much hate-mail and threats as I did when I was writing that column. My mother begged me to stop writing it, my father asked me why I couldn’t just write about happy less problematic things and a lot of my relationships with people got weird but the veil was lifted and I was finally speaking as an identifiable entity and not my shadow-entity.

And then something amazing happened.

My friend decided he wanted to host an erotic film festival in various cities around the country and he asked me if I would teach there. Until that moment, I had not seriously considered teaching (about sexuality and fetishism, I had taught writing before) and for the most part, I had been opposed to it, but when he asked, I suddenly realised what had happened. A decade had passed, we had grown up, we had kitchens and freedom, if we wanted to host film festivals and launch businesses to teach sex, we could. We had already paid the price, and while that’s not pleasant and it feels horrible, you know what comes after that? Delicious fearlessness. The courage to get on a stage and tell a bunch of people how a microcosm of society resides in your anal sex associated trauma.

Except I got on that stage with a bum-ankle and I had to sit my ass down while I explained how much stuff goes into discovering one’s own, unique sexual fingerprint. Ultimately, the fact that I didn’t get my image of it right does not matter at all. The fact that inane internecine squabbles followed us even into this sphere does not matter at all. In the grand scheme of things, one person speaking to a room of fifty about things that had been held back for generations may not mean very much at all, but to us, it was not about that, it was about two kids who dreamt of being free to do it. It was about the fact that you could get dozens of people in the room to appreciate a visual depiction of sexuality and you didn’t feel the need to cower in shame for having provided that. It was about the fact that dozens of people felt comfortable enough in a space to share things they had never said out loud before and to me, a stranger with a power-point presentation as credentials.

For a decade, when I talked and wrote about sex, it felt like I was sending the message really far away, but around me, I was speaking into a vacuum or a hostile force. That day, for the first time, the vacuum was gone and the backlash was gone. I was talking to a room full of people who wanted to be there. It’s a strange moment when your dreams are no longer in the future, it is that moment you realise you were working towards them all along. And then you sweat from head-to-toe in a tie you once stole from your father and you look for your friend in the audience, and he’s high-as-fuck, and for a second, you wonder when you can go back to a room together, and talk about what you’ve done. It doesn’t really matter where the room is or how big or small. You just want to sit beside your friend and talk about who you’ve become.

....

Note: This piece is the first in a column I am starting about being/becoming a sexual educator in India. There are a lot of unique, funny, moving and interesting experiences I have been having since the past ten months and I'd like a separate space to explore all of that. I haven't named the column yet (and suggestions are welcome!). For now this column is accessible to my Patrons only.