Category Archives: Blog

This is the blog.

by Helio

Inspiration; Everything

I see that I last posted on July 17th, well over a month ago.

How did that happen? All my grand plans to start a new internet presence, to branch out, connect, figure out what an RSS feed does, make it into the future and stop being a luddite and be brilliant and build an army of internet followers to change the face of sex education in America… where’d that go?

Well, it was all potential energy, wasn’t it? And it got burned off, as it does, by life. Life has hit me where it hurts, this past month and a half or so. I have moved from the apartment I once shared with my once partner, to a small and slant-ceilinged place of my own. It was an overwhelming effort, despite the new one being only a few blocks from the old. I had to take a life apart. I came home from traveling to find gaps where my ex had removed his stuff, I stared at the space where the table had been like it was a hole in the safety and comfort of the things I’d build my life out of. I cried. I have cried so much in the past few months I’m beginning to think I’m no longer 70% water. I must have lost at least half of that by now. I am the world’s first reduced-water human being, only 33%. The rest of me is the space left by changing everything you are into something new. It’s potential energy, again.

And in the past month and half, having fallen into and out of and into love, a loved one of mine left for across the continent, where he is building up from scratch and running on fumes. I am loving a person who wakes slowly every morning to fight to face another day because it has been too long since he has felt safety, regularity, inspiration, comfort, and despite the fact that I have been fighting for the same things for almost equally long, I can hold no blame for him for not being able to provide for me. We fight. We cry. We disconnect and we reconnect and we grow stronger, and sooner or later the sadness will be gone and we will dance in sunlight ever after.

And speaking of disconnecting and reconnecting, I started a new job. And when I say I started a new job, I must take the time to make a nod, or perhaps a deep and courteous bow, and to tip my hat and do a dance for the overwhelming inspiration of our President, Barack Obama.

I graduated in May 2008 from Wesleyan University, and I expected to hear, at my graduation, the wise and dearly missed Senator Ted Kennedy say something inspirational, and frankly I expected not to listen.

But Senator Kennedy, even then, was not well. So in the middle of the week between the end of finals and commencement day, when I was busy chasing after people I shouldn’t and forming new and sometimes painful relationships with people I very much should, we discovered we’d have to get a pinch-hitter for our commencement speaker. A little known man who once did community organization on the South Side of Chicago, Barack Obama.

With secret service men on the roof of the library, he smiled his more-than-a-movie-star smile at us and he spoke of his work in the community, he spoke of giving back what had been given to us, of taking our new education and our promise and making the world a better place, and I sort of said… whatever.

But then, months past, time past, and what did I do but I started working with kids, I started working with kids and I started thinking about kids and I started looking around me and I started to doubt all the things I had told myself about why I didn’t need to devote my life to changing the world. Because it turns out I do, actually. Because the world is bright and brilliant and beautiful and needs to be better.

So when I say I started a new job what I mean, in fact, is that I joined up with AmeriCorps. I’ll be working in a library and I’ll be helping the poorest of the poor in a very poor city in a very poor state learn to recognize letters of the alphabet even before they get to school, because literacy starts early and the truth is many kids are behind before the school system even had a chance to neglect them. So I’m learning about how the mind works when it is just forming, and about how children connect, and disconnect, and reconnect, and I’m making connections.

I haven’t been doing so much of that, recently. I’ve been feeling like I can’t put any more energy into any more things, until some of it comes back to me. I’ve been feeling wrung out and pained and abandoned and abused, because we all feel like that, sometimes, even when it isn’t true, because life just is not fair. I’ve been watching TV to keep my mind from thinking, and comforting myself with substances, and I’ve not been creating.

But then today when I got home instead of watching MythBusters blowing things up, I went to www.illdoctrine.com and I watched Jay Smooth talk brilliance about race, hip-hop, and politics. And then I went to www.ted.com and watched Rives spin words, and I showed it to some friends who I thought would like it and they said, “Yeah, we know.”

So, ok. I’m slow. I don’t know, until I find out, but I remember that the way to be smart and do things is to focus your attention on smart people who are doing things. The way to get other people to be smart and do things is to be smart and do things yourself, and not ever to look at them and ask them with a voice full of disappointment why it is they aren’t doing the same.

To those of you who know me, or who care about such things, it’s worth noting: I am hurting, but healing. I am rubbed raw. I am rebuilding, and other than Helping The Children and Talking About Sex I have no idea where I will be a year from now, and a year ago I kind of thought I did. I miss those things that are gone. I value those things that are here. Each day contains pain, and it’s hard to keep happiness pure, but I am glad to be here again. I hope to become once more a custodian of myself, as well as a caretaker of the world, and I hope to bring things to this spot that I find valuable and insightful and interesting, and I hope you will find those things similarly worthy. Because the truth is, the way to feel energy coming back to myself, is to put it into creative, stimulating stuff. It can be just like a magic penny.

And by the by, thanks, Mr. Obama! I didn’t know you could inspire me without my knowing I had been inspired. That, sir, is inspirational.

by Helio

Having It All: A Gender Post with Pictures

This picture was posted recently over at Male Submission Art:
A young man kneels on the ground in a forested area, his wrists loosely tied with a single thick rope to the stump of a tree. I think this photograph, suggested by Dorinda, is beautiful (albeit with sorry-looking bondage) and I like the vintage feel it has. I particularly like the shape of the model’s back, ass, and legs; the curvature of his lower body looks feminine while the trapezoidal frame of his upper body looks masculine, and I appreciate this aesthetic mix immensely; it’s pretty and manly. Much of the time, people refer to the mixing of genders as androgyny, but that word has etymological roots pertaining to being devoid of gender, of being genderless. While valid and attractive to me in its own way at times, this is subtly different from what I find most attractive: the presence of mixed genders. Rather than being half a woman (50% feminine) and half a man (50% masculine), why can’t we be all of both at once? A person can still have 100% feminine and 100% masculine wholes within themselves. -maymay
Forgive me for the overwhelming hubris of re-posting a link to a post of mine, but I wanted to take the complete text, as it is speaking to a subject dear to my heart. May‘s caption for the post reads:
“A young man kneels on the ground in a forested area, his wrists loosely tied with a single thick rope to the stump of a tree.I think this photograph, suggested by Dorinda, is beautiful (albeit with sorry-looking bondage) and I like the vintage feel it has. I particularly like the shape of the model’s back, ass, and legs; the curvature of his lower body looks feminine while the trapezoidal frame of his upper body looks masculine, and I appreciate this aesthetic mix immensely; it’s pretty and manly.
Much of the time, people refer to the mixing of genders as androgyny, but that word has etymological roots pertaining to being devoid of gender, of being genderless. While valid and attractive to me in its own way at times, this is subtly different from what I find most attractive:the presence of mixed genders. Rather than being half a woman (50% feminine) and half a man (50% masculine), why can’t we be all of both at once? A person can still have 100% feminineand 100% masculine wholes within themselves.“
I also want to say right here and now that that rope is pathetic and useless and the picture would basically be better without it since it is really only draped around and that’s just stupid and why isn’t he moving his hands or something and why does he have that pained (very hot) look on his face since he is not actually attached to that tree in anyway. Ok. /End rant. Back to gender.
I should state that I do, in fact, find androgyny incredibly sexy. This type of beauty-without-gender is embodied, to me, in Tilda Swinton‘s portrayal of the Angel Gabriel in the really and truly terrible movie Constantine:
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It’s a lovely look, but it’s not one I’m interested in emulating, partly because I can’t. If you’ve met me in person, you might have noticed a certain … largeness … about my hips, a certain … not-so-largeness … around my middle section. I look like a woman, and no amount of binding will turn me into a svelte, effete androgen. The best I can hope for is barrel-chested drag-king, and while I may try it one day, I still won’t ever look like Tilda, more’s the pity.
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But that’s ok. Because when I play with gender, I don’t want to play it down. I want to play it up. In my estimation, masculinity and femininity should be decoupled, two separate sliding scales. If you turn up your masculinity, you should not automatically turn down your femininity, nor vice versa. You can turn them both down to zero, in which case you wind up a Swinton-esque, androgynous creature, in the best case, and Pat-from-Saturday-Night-Live, in the worst. You can turn up one or the other,  or you can turn up both, and be something for which there is perhaps no word.
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The closest approximation of what I’m looking for might be hermaphroditic. The word comes from the God/dess Hermaphroditus, born male, the son of Hermes and Aphrodite. In a stunning gender-norm-reversal of the common Grecian story of desire and rape, the water-nymph Salmacis saw Hermaphroditus and was driven mad with desire for him. Although he had refused her, she hid behind a tree to watch him bathe, and on seeing him unclothed, seized him and embraced and kissed him, crying to the Gods that they should never be parted. Never ones to skip out on an opportunity to be overly literal and play a cruel trick on mortals, the Gods listened and joined their two forms, creating a being with both sets of genitalia, both a man and a woman. “Hermaphrodite” is now a somewhat un-P.C. term for “Intersex,” but is typically used to mean a person who is, as May said, 50%/50% Male-Female, rather than 100% of each.
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Which is not to say that nobody in literature has ever had that brilliant idea before. I give you Neil Gaiman’s Anthropomorphic Personification of Desire:
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This is not a particularly fabulous rendition; in fact, I find that none of the renditions, in the graphic novels or available on the internet, are really perfect. It’s very hard to draw a creature entirely male and entirely female; an entity that embodies everything you want. Everything everybody wants. But it does make sense that such a creature would be not part male, part female, but all there was to be of both of those, and more. Even in this picture, we see the suggestion of breasts at the same time as the suggestion of an adams apple, a strong jawline and soft lips, a whole lot of sex and a whole lot of gender.
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I like that. Liking gender, finding masculinity and femininity both sexy, but more so when together, I feel like I just want to get as much gender as I possibly can. I want it all, all the time. I recently cut my hair short. Short so that my dad says “You look like a 10-year-old-boy” and my best friend says “You are so butch! Like a hot little elf!” (I’ll take her response over his, any day). I suppose at this point should not be surprised, but now that I’m masculine from the neck up, I find myself craving sundresses and floral skirts. I cannot be just one. I must have all, I must have both, the more I scale up my masculinity, the more I want to scale up my femininity to match. To keep a balance; all gender or none. Everything or nothing, baby.
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There are, of course, questions to be asked here, and one that has been rattling around in my head has to do with how all this lovely gender is expressed. When I talk about being feminine, masculine, both, I talk first and foremost about clothing, from a tailcoat and a bowler hat to a motorcycle jacket to a flirty, fitted dress to a red satin pencil skirt and pumps, gender is something I put on to go out and peel back off when I come home again. The multiplicity I talk about comes when I add red lipstick to the bowler and tails, put the motorcycle jacket and the sundress together, wear a collared shirt and tie with my red skirt and heels. Some of it comes with my hair… when a few months ago it was long and feminine, I could put it up or take it down to suit my mood. Now, it’s a fixed point around which my gender expression can turn.
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So my question, for another post, and harkening back to how I felt when I made love to May in the post he’s linked to in his caption, is how one expresses gender without the props? How can I be a man when I’m naked, how can I be masculine-and-feminine at the same time when I haven’t got my lipstick, my fedora, my toolkit of gender signifiers? How can the lovely boy in the Male Submission Art picture that started this look so feminine around the curve of his back and ass, so masculine in his shoulders, his face? What is gender-in-the-nude? I’m not sure. If you’ve got thoughts, let me know – I will keep thinking, and tell you when the pieces fit together.
by Helio

Quick and Dirty Blogging: STI Clinics Done Me Wrong

This is just a brief post to express my frustration with the STI clinic at which Maymay just very responsibly made an appointment to have himself re-screened.

I was going to do so, too. He called and attempted to make appointments for both of us, consecutively. He was told that he couldn’t make them both, but that there were consecutive appointments, and I should call in. I did, I was shunted to the emergency testing line, who cordially asked me about the unprotected sex I might have had in the past 72 hours. Upon being told that no, I have every reason to believe I’m clean, I just want to make sure, I was shunted back to make an appointment, and then told there was none for over a month, which was then reduced to two weeks. There were none, apparently, consecutive to May’s appointment… that information would only have been accurate if I was male. Because my appointments have to be made through gynocology.

What pisses me off most, here, is not that they were disorganized, listened to him and didn’t listen to me, assumed that when I wanted testing it was because I had done something irresponsible whereas his appointment was just common sense. No, what pisses me off is that the operator who spoke to May must have assumed that his partner was male. Otherwise they wouldn’t have told him there were such consecutive appointments, because appointments are apparently just made differently and along different schedules for women and for men. Which is fine, but fuck you operator for assuming my lover only sleeps with dudes because he’s responsible about his sexual health and he has a soft-toned voice. Fuck you long and hard.

I’ll get my screening another time.

by Helio

A Good Question…

I have been doing alot of talking with May about the world and the internet. It has brought up a good question. Find it and the answer at http://ismeitarright.com.

And with that, I’m off to Chicago, by way of Western Mass, Michigan, nearly 20 hours of driving and a bucket full of joy.

by Helio

Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things —
For skies of couple-colored as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls, finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced — fold, fallow and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

By Gerard Manly Hopkins, 1877