The Performance Of Sexuality.

A few years ago, I stopped attending any play-parties. It was partly because of a few bad experiences with boundaries but mostly because there was something about playing in public in that capacity that wasn’t working for me. It wasn’t an issue borne from trepidation or bashfulness, I only do shy if I am being paid to do it, it was because I couldn’t really figure out *why* I was playing in public. I did have fun but that is because I am able to enjoy most social settings, I am a (solitary) extrovert, I play the fool and the facilitator well enough to survive anything (except weddings, it turns out), but I also choose my social situations carefully, I like being with people when the people are vital to the experience. You know how people spend time in a room together, doing their own things? I cannot do that because all I can think about then, is why are we just not alone right now? And that was the question I couldn’t answer about the people at play-parties/spaces. What was the purpose of the other people in the room to me? They were there, they could see/glance at what I was doing if they wanted but they were all largely there to play themselves, which is fine, of course, that’s what they came to do but, in those settings, all I could think of was that I could have done this at home. And so, I did.

But I did wonder, what did I want the purpose of the people to be?

It’s very clear. The answer is littered all over my life. I don’t want co-players; I want an audience. The performance of my sexuality is splashed across everything I do. It’s why I write my sex-life, for instance, and why I write it the *way* I do. I don’t just want to tell people what I did, it’s not a kiss-and-tell situation, if it were, I would probably change my plot-points more often. It’s not even exhibitionism, at least in so far as, I interpret exhibitionism as a process that makes you feel watched in situations that *feel private* and none of this actually feels private to me, it feels *intimate* which is *different*. It’s not didactic, either, I do write things that are meant to inform and/or educate, but that’s not what I am talking about, when I write erotic non-fiction (which is a term I am fairly sure I coined, and am now using generously, so as to get it to catch on as a genre, so please do it as well, I want to read more erotic non-fiction, it’s like the CNF version of erotica), I am not trying to teach anything, I am not demonstrating lessons. It’s something else. It’s the demonstration of a sexual relationship. It’s a performance of it, and things like metaphors, syntax, stream of consciousness and structure are the performative ornaments of writing. They are there because they aid in the fact that I want the people who are reading to really feel things—relatability, fear, joy, confronted, sadness, arousal, conflicted—that does something for me. It gets me off. I want to know and see how experiencing my world felt for you; I want to feel you inside me while I create it for you and feel myself inside you when you consume. I don’t want you to accidentally chance upon my private display, I want you to *come for the show*.

It's the explicitness of the established relationship too. Performer and audience. It’s a relationship that is so clearly defined, we can know each other so intimately in it, and still remain strangers. That’s my social sweet-spot. I want to tell you and show you things about myself that are strange and considered too much if I do it over coffee, I want to have emotions around you that are improper at lunch but okay when I do them from a *stage*, because that’s what a stage is for, anyway. Social convention about *what is okay* does not apply on a stage (within reason), because (performance) art is allowed to do things that are disallowed in most relationships and social environments. It’s allowed to be explicit and gritty, it’s allowed to hurt you, it’s allowed to be too much. I get that feedback often, that I am *too much*, I do know, it’s why I mainly engage with the world through writing. There is enough distance there for me to be too much. It’s like stage make-up, you look a little nuts when you go to the market all pancaked, but on stage it looks beautiful and natural. The roles in which I engage with the world have a lot in common—on stage, on screen, on camera, on radio, as the interviewer—the distance at which I feel most comfortable truly being myself, not because I wish to hide, but because some things, are seen better from afar.

It’s an intimate distance. 

That’s what I am doing when I when I perform my sexuality through writing and it is what I have always wanted to do in person, as well. When I was in college, I really wanted to do live-sex shows, I didn’t think it was a possibility so I hacked it. I teamed forces with my friend, who is gay but was the kind of voyeur who really just wanted to watch anyone fuck, and so we found people for me to fuck who were okay with him watching from a closet (which was his idea, he wanted to watch hetero sex from a closet to amuse himself with the concept). It was fun and it did scratch an itch, but not in the way a live sex-show would have, you know? As I got older, I realised it wasn’t sex of the genital variety that I got off to performing. I really wanted people to watch me do the things that evoke most emotion in me—pain, control and violence—and I discovered that accidentally when my spouse showed a video of him beating me to a different friend. On multiple occasions, we considered renting a space, curating a guest-list and putting on a show, but I couldn’t figure out how to pull that together, I wasn’t sure I could manage it safely, so I continued just sharing videos with people who were interested and posting some. It was hot but it didn’t make me feel the same way that writing the violence does. I really just wanted to be able to perform it for an audience, who were there to see it, and didn’t really know me. 

And I was finally able to do it!

At an event this weekend, I was able to actually do it! Allow me a moment of sincerity, I have wanted to do things like this since I had any concept of sexuality, but I grew up in a country and a town where it was already radical that I was professionally ambitious and openly considering pre-marital sex with all genders. When I was a teenager and I looked at the world around me, I really did not think these things would be possible because I truly believed that if we wanted spaces to do these things, we would have to be the ones to create them and I wasn’t sure how much I, an individual, could really do. I have always tried my best to create everything I want to see in the world, but many things are outside my ambit. Or, I thought, we had to make ourselves patently unsafe to do these things. Or we would have to be in the industry of sex, which also meant that we had to be scared that someone would find out or accept that being a known sex-worker meant that we were expelled from a certain part of society forever and subject to a type of disparity that makes you an unsympathetic victim should something happen to you as a result of your “lifestyle choices”. At nineteen, when I first acted on the decision to be a sex-worker, I did it partly because I believed I could access a space where the nature of sexual experiences I desired may be more available because those desires, considered perverted, salacious and degenerate, were relegated to spaces of perversion and degeneracy, and that is how sex-work was being (wrongly) viewed, and all of those social costs seemed like the price I had to pay to be me. I did abusive relationships as a young woman because they seemed like the only spaces where pain and violence were available. To see where I stand today, from the perspective of the person I was at eighteen, this world seemed impossible. This is not a world where I had to go to the seedy underbelly where my sexuality was fostered to perform an act that was considered wrong even by the audience that hides in secret to watch it, nor am I, any longer, the person who feels like she doesn’t know how to manage pulling together a group of people to watch her perform violence, and I find that blows my mind. I am so grateful to any entity, for creating spaces where people can animate their sexual dreams. 

And I did.

It was more fun than I have had in a long time. It gave me that exact feeling I get when I am laying bare the sexual selves of my partner(s) and I, to perform them in words, but it has a different element to it as well. The fact that I could sense the audience made them more perceptible and accentuated the feeling of performance. Writing can feel performative, but it is very private as well, primarily because its performance is in the act of recounting, but this wasn’t like that. It had the real-time element that writing can never accomplish. I wondered, before I did it, whether I would feel as intimately connected with my partner as I do when we have sex (read: play violence and pain) privately, and it came so easily. It didn’t feel like I had to drown anyone out, to let him in. Knowing the people were there didn’t feel like exposure, it felt like being seen as who I really am and who I am contains this sexuality that plays out in private with my partner, every single day, and being able to share that with other people felt like we were bringing them into this intimacy we share. And, for me, personally, performance makes me more uninhibited (and I’m not very inhibited as a person but there is an element, of artistic sentimentality, that cannot be approached alone because it is informed by the audience). I loved being able to perform something that gets me the fuck off. 

I’m going to do this a million more times, okay? Thank you.