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Blaque In The City

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The musings and misadventures of Kat Blaque

Blogs

  • The Kittens in My Garden

    One of my most vivid childhood memories is getting lost. Believe it or not, I got lost a lot as a child. I was one of those leash kids. We were on a walk in our neighborhood and she was outpacing me. She was dressed in her smart, purple work out attire that, in my memory, is always a very of-the-era retro design. She was focused on her fitness goal, while I was taking a more casual pace. I was always the kinda kid that walked the mile. This was one of the very first times I’d ever gone this far into the neighborhood. I was raised to be cautious; and growing up where I did, I never truly knew what it felt like to feel unsafe.

    Our town had virtually zero crime and moving there was very intentional for my parents. My father was raised in the projects of Boston and he didn’t want his children to ever live a life like that. So, when they adopted us, they decided to raise us in a very safe, quite neighborhood in the San Gabriel Valley. My parents were the original owners our home, and that was impressive, but the houses higher on the hill were more impressive to me at the time. The further up you went, the bigger the houses became and the wider the driveways got. I’ve always loved architecture and I remember admiring those big homes, wanting to live in one myself, but not appreciating, at the time just how good I had it. In my wanderlust, I got distracted and lost my way. My mother would hit pause on her Walkmen and then double back to get me. She’d never leave me behind, but I remember that little bit of anxiety I had about holding her back. She was so driven and goal oriented and as a child, I don’t think I was quite as perceptive of just how much sacrifice she made to become a mother. She slowed down her pace and we walked the rest of the way together.

    I would describe my mother as a type-A personality. Perhaps she developed it over time through my grandmother, a glamorous woman who, to my understanding, was fairly strict. She had high expectations for my mother, and from what I can tell, she fulfilled them. She graduated from Harvard with a Masters Degree, she married a good Christian man, she raised her children in a safe neighborhood and was very involved with the church. My mother was…impressive. One of the most impressive women I’ve ever known.

    While my parents raised me in LA County, my mother worked in the middle of the city. She’d drive almost 4 hours to and from work daily, and sometimes I’d go with her. It’s impossible for me not to associate the city with my mother. I spent a lot of time with my mother, perhaps because, despite her being a working mom, she was otherwise quite traditional. She was pique 90s business woman classy. She always kept herself together and til the week of her death, she always kept a consistent hair appointment. You could never catch her slipping, and I remember my grandmother being the same way, just a bit more 60s glam. I’d often go with her into the city for her hair appointments. The culture shock I had when she’d show up to some lady’s house in the hood and she’d be getting her hair done in the kitchen, the smell of Blue Magic mixing with the smell of stove-fried chicken. People were so different in LA. Not to mention, growing up in the SGV, most of my neighbors were Chinese. I didn’t know very many other black people and sometimes these ventures into LA were the only times I interacted with black folks I wasn’t related to.

    My mother was the first person I came out to. I don’t remember exactly how it happened, but I do remember I started by telling her that I was attracted to men and I did this already knowing very well that I was not cis. When I said this to her, she said “that’s not it”; and initially I interpreted that as a rejection of my own statement of my sexuality; but with time I realized that she saw through my (not very convincing) gender performance at the time and recognized that I was likely a trans woman. She never encouraged me or told me who I was, but she never judged me. In school, I got into the habit of wearing baggy clothes over my usually hand-drawn, painted, or sewn clothes that I wore to school that were decidedly more feminine. My father shamed me a lot for being feminine when I was a child, so I learned to hide myself from him, but my mom was a different case. Sometimes she’d be sitting right there when I’d get back home and she’d see part of what I actually wore to school. She’d always chime in with a compliment or a comment about something I was wearing. I have a distinct voice memory of her saying “I like that” whenever I wore something different. I’ll never forget when I purchased my first pair of Doc Martens from my first check from my first animation job and she told me she wanted a pair herself. I guess it shouldn’t surprise me that she liked my style so much as she was one of my first inspirations, but at the time, it always caught me off guard. I hadn’t expected her to be so accepting of me before I came out. She didn’t love all of my outfits though. Maybe the shorts were too short sometimes or the pants too tight. She made sure to let me know, but never made me feel terrible for being myself.

    Shockingly, I was a Thespian in High School; and for my Advanced Drama assignments, we’d have to go see actual stage plays and do reports about them. My mom and I would go into LA by ourselves and go to the most bizarre little plays. Once I came out to my mom, I wanted to see as many LBGT themed plays as possible. When I came out to my mom, I asked her not to tell my father. So it became, I guess, our own little secret. I feel strange about that now, but back then I was so terrified of my father knowing that it felt nice to have someone at home that loved me enough not to do what I was afraid of my father doing to me. While I still remained closeted to my father, outside of the home, in retrospect, I was pretty out there in every other context. I was a kid with splatter painted rainbow jeans and fingerless gloves. we went to so many plays that had queer themes and I remember that being very impactful for me because I didn’t know very many queer people at the time. After the plays, we’d often go get food. There was always this line between my mom and I, and my brother and my father. They’re traditional dudes with chicken tenders diets and we’re more adventurous eaters with an ethnically diverse taste. So we always took our time together as an opportunity to eat in a more worldly way. We had this tradition of getting Pho, which was very exotic to us at the time. My mom and I just had this thing…this thing that only her and I shared. This knowing. This kinship. This love that was specific to us. A sense of humor and warmth and closeness. There was no voice that calmed me more.

    After college, I briefly moved back in with my parents who, by then, had moved from that two story home I grew up in, into a little apartment in San Dimas. It sounds so classist now, but I remember thinking about how sad it must be that they moved from a home to an apartment. We went from having a ton of space to very very little. By then, it was impossible for my father to ignore that I was a woman. At this point, I’d already been stealth and since we lived in a new town now, I was functionally stealth while live in San Dimas at the time. I had just turned 21 and I went on a lot of dates and eventually, I met someone and we moved in with each other and I officially left home. When I moved out, things were a bit strained. My partner was white (well, passing… but that was a white boy!), and my dad didn’t really accept our relationship. Partially because he was white, but I think mostly because he was a man. Moving out marked the point where I started seeing my parents a lot less. Because of my father’s treatment of me, I didn’t like to call home very often and I often resented receiving phone calls from him. It was so hard to talk to someone who flat out doesn’t accept the version of you that is dramatically happier. I regret letting that get in the way of me speaking to my mother while she was still alive. She didn’t deserve to be punished because of how much I struggled to speak to my father. I will always regret not calling enough and bearing and grinning my discomfort just to speak to her more. I thought I’d be raising a family with that particular boyfriend and ultimately, after 6 years, I realized the suburban dream I imagined having with him wasn’t really what I wanted, and I no longer wanted to live in one of those big houses on the hill. So I left him and went to the city.

    A lot of the little shows we went to were in the Hollywood/Los Feliz/ Silverlake area, and I knew that when I moved to LA, that’s the general area I wanted to be in. A few years ago, I signed a lease on a new apartment and I finally live in the Silverlake area of Los Angels. I really love my neighborhood… it’s gang territory apparently, but I’ve been told that if I mind my business, I’ll be fine. My neighbors seem to be really sweet even though I kinda stand out in the neighborhood. Once again, I’m one of the only black people in my area, but I love my location and everyone’s pretty friendly. My neighbors are mostly Salvadorian and they’ve confided in me that they’d rather have me here than a white gentrifier. I suppose my gentrification is less bad because I’m black. My apartment isn’t cheap, but it’s not the most expensive place I’ve lived. It’s the first place i’ve lived in LA that feels like home. I can’t believe I ever wanted to live in a big mansion. What would I even do with all of those rooms? I think it’s the perfect amount of room for me, and the best thing is, I’ve got a patio!

    I’ve never had an outdoor space before and I gotta be honest, it really makes a difference! There’s something really nice about sitting on my patio with a CD on in the other room, a cocktail in my hand, the sound of my neighbor’s Bachata in the distance, and that sweet, sweet city air… maybe even a blunt to really take it over the edge. It’s like my little corner of paradise. It’s been a fun little project for me. I’ve never had outdoor space before so I’ve enjoyed buying all of these various little doo-hickeys for it. A cute little table and chairs, fake leaves to cover my storage, an umbrella for shade during the summer. I didn’t know I had to buy a heavy iron base for my umbrella when I first got it and I was so excited when I eventually got one and I was finally able to up my umbrella! That’s when I started sitting out there and I decided to cover the back gate with thick bamboo to give myself a little privacy because yes I do be on my patio half naked cuz I’m grown!

    A lot of times when I’m writing my scripts for my Youtube videos, I’ll sit on my back patio and write on my Macbook. I was on my patio one afternoon when I got the phone call from my father. He said, through tears,

    “Mumma’s Dead”

    They’ve been married nearly 50 years and I knew that this man, whom I had grown so distant from, was hurting desperately. And so was I. I don’t think I understood permanence until I realized I could never speak to her ever again. I had waited for this moment in time where I’d be able to have Pho with her again, and it never came. It never will come and that hurt. It still hurts. My wound will never heal. I felt helpless so I screamed louder than I’ve ever screamed and a bunch of my neighbors peeped their heads out to see me crying on my patio. That was a day that changed me.

    I remember sitting on her bed with her one afternoon, watching Bay Watch and chatting between commercials; and she told me that when she dies, she wants yellow roses at her funeral. I didn’t register it until I was at the funeral home, flipping through floral arrangements that the reason she said this to me was that I would ultimately be the person to make these plans. She knew that even back then. I figured out through my mother’s death that I was the most successful person in my family. Her funeral fell almost entirely on me. She had a Christian burial complete with a pastor from our church and I made sure she got her yellow roses and a lilac casket. She got her final manicure, hairstyle that I know she would have appreciated and beautiful dress that maintained her modesty, how she often did. Edward held me while I cried nonstop at her funeral. My hair was green at the time. It felt disrespectful and inappropriate for the situation, but I can hear my mom saying “I like that”. When she died, something within me shifted. An innocence I felt I still had, I recognized had been gone for quite some time.


    One of the more recent additions to my patio was a small vase with my mother’s image on it. My aunts friend made it and I managed to take it from the repass. They have this sorta craft-like appeal that I know my mother would have loved. My mother is the reason I’m an artist. In fact, she’s the one who took me to an animation convention many years ago when I was a child; and it was there that I decided to go to Cal Arts because a very impressive person there had graduated from there. She was always making room for creativity. She volunteered for the Brownie Scouts at our church and she was always responsible for coming up with some new craft. Because I was always with her, I ended up doing a lot of these crafts and I think that’s where I got a lot of my handy, DIY nature from. I have fond memories of stealing her sewing kit and hand sewing a lot of my first pieces of feminine clothing. I have all the culture I do because of my mother. She introduced me to a world outside of the bubble created for me and placed the creative seeds in my mind that ultimately led to me being successful enough to be able to bury her.

    The photo on the vase is a photo of my mother in her home office. It’s a photo that portrays a fashionable woman in very humble beginnings. It’s a good portrait of the mother I remember the most. I found a lot of photos of her before she ever became a mom. It’s strange looking at photos of who your mother was before you existed. She had a sheen of youth, optimism and whimsy in her old photos. It’s clear that adopting us changed a lot for her. As I went through her things, this became even more clear to me. In every unfinished notebook and every scrap of paper nestled between a Daniel Steele novel, I saw the dreams she had. Every job she considered getting, language she started learning, every future plan she had and so so so many unfinished notebooks. One of the notebooks I found had little scribbles of texting acronyms. I remember when she wrote it when texting started and she would tickle herself with the silly acronyms we used during the height of t-9 texting. She loved that something like “g2g” meant “got to go” and “ilu” meant “I love you”. She always delighted in those simple things. She hated feeling out of date, and she was starting to look into taking classes about technology. I regret those moments I was frustrated explaining technology to her. I think she would have enjoyed TikTok.

    My mom struggled with MS for many years. I saw her slowly deteriorate from the woman who would leave me in her dust to a woman who relied on everyone for everything. She hated that. She hated that she was no longer able to be the type-A person she used to be. She never wanted to give anyone the impression that she couldn’t do it. As I’m writing this with tears soaking my face, I’m realizing that I get so much of my spirit from her. That was one of the strange things I realized as I processed her death. That so much of who I am, is actually her. In many ways, I’m almost a different version of her that went down an incredibly different path. As I collected her things, I noticed just how many little private bits of happiness she put aside for herself. So that’s where I get it! She had all sorts of trinkets and things that may have seemed insignificant to most, but I know for her contained a memory. We had so much in common and when I found this picture of her, I cried because I never realized that she too also used to wear oversized glasses. I’d never known that, we’d never discussed it. We’re just oriented the same way. Even though I’m not biologically related to her, it’s hard not seeing how much of her is in me.

    Growing up, my father built a walk-in closet for my mother to store her extensive wardrobe in. Because I used to go through it all the time, I was aware of just how much she had downsized. She used to fill rack upon rack with clothes, but at the end of it all, she had very few things. She’d moved twice by now so she had downsized just slightly, but surprisingly, she kept a box full of every accomplishment I ever achieved. Every silly paper I got an A on. Every poem I ever wrote her. Every playbill. Every trophy.

    Recently, I decided to make a real attempt at having a garden. I don’t have a green thumb at all… in fact, none of my plants have managed to stay alive. However, at the funeral, someone gave me a house plant. I dunno the name of it, but it’s a pretty cool lookin’ one. I’ve managed to keep it alive and that made me feel hopeful; so naturally, I decided I could buy a few garden beds from Target and actually try to grow my own food!

    I planted a bunch of random shit. Mostly squash, herbs, tomatoes, peppers, swiss chard and some random flowers. It was slow starting at first, but it’s really started to flourish. I still gotta figure out a way to get rid of those pesky aphids, but all-in-all, it’s starting to look really productive. I started moving some of my planters around to catch the sun more effectively and I feel like I’ve recently found the most perfect feng shui for my patio because it now feels massive and lush now that my summer squash is really taking off. I gotta do some cleaning, but it’s really becoming a peaceful place. my little corner of tranquility.

    The tricky thing about having a garden is you have to tend to it. Right now she’s a little sensitive. The heat is getting to her so I have to make sure I always come back to my apartment and water it so that she’ll continue to grow. A few days ago, Edward finally helped me set up a drip system so I’m expecting it to grow a lot better now. However, before then, it was nice to have a reason to come back to my apartment and take care of something. I spend most of my time at his apartment so until recently, it wasn’t uncommon for me to miss a day and then come back to wilted plants. That started feeling selfish though so I made a habit to come back every day to make sure the plants were ok.

    The past week or so, I’ve had some visitors on the patio. A pair of very adorable kittens who have recently enjoyed using my patio as a shady little get-away during the heat wave.

    Alexander saw them this week when we had our date and he and his wife are pretty notorious for taking in the neighborhood cats. They have a little shelter for the ones that stop by. When the kitties first came to my patio, I realized how nice it felt to have them there. They’re so cute and sweet, and its just nice to see them. It brightens up my day a little bit. One of them is really timid and shy and the other is very chaotic. I sometimes sit on my patio and watch them catch flies.


    I got the impression that they weren’t eating and didn’t have a cool place to lay so I decided to open up my umbrella and I tried to create a few little spaces for them to chill on my patio. For my mother’s funeral, I received a large flower arrangement in a basket. I kept the basket for emotional reasons, and I realized that it would actually make a pretty great little place for the littles to chill. So I took some pillows and put it in there so they’d have a place to relax.

    Today while I was in Target, I decided to get a little bag of cat food for them because I figured they were hungry. When I got home, I took my doggy placemat and put some food and water in it and they took to it immediately. I actually grew up with a little kitty named Sparkle who my parents had to get rid of because I was allergic. That’s always made me sorta sad. I’ve never really been a pet person. I like cats, I guess but I’m not a cat lady, really…not yet at least. And I gotta admit, these cute kids had me really considering it.

    As I sat there watching them eat…I started crying. There she goes again, crying on her damn patio. I realized that in a way, without realizing it, I had been exerting, in my own small way, a maternal energy in the space where I learned that I had lost my mother. I think my mother passing away shifted something within me that made me care a bit more about hungry kitties in need of shady place to lay their head. Sometimes when I have moments like this, I wonder if this is evidence of some sort of suppressed maternal desire I have deep down inside. I came to LA for self discovery when I realized that I didn’t really want that suburban life I once dreamed of. But sometimes I have these moments where I remember that a different version of me imagined that at this point in my life, I’d be putting my kids into the 2nd grade. And honestly, there are times where I think about it. Should I be a mom? I feel like the overwhelming answer is a no. I can’t imagine it… but at the same time, I think I’d be a really cool mom. Maybe feeding these kitties is the closest I’ll ever get. As they skittered back into their little shelter under my garden bed, I felt immensely thankful to those kitties for giving me a moment of purpose and not running away from me when I started crying. I like them on my patio. I love the kittens in my garden.

    As it turns out, those kitties aren’t street kitties at all. They’ve got a parent already, so there goes my fantasy of adopting them! They still come to my garden and they’ve since become favored by my neighbors. I’m really thankful that my mom adopted me. We aren’t biologically related, but that’s my mother through and through. I used to think we were so different and I wish I was able to celebrate how similar we were when she was alive. I realize now that every little polite suggestion she gave me was her recognizing part of herself in me. That while I knew her as my mother, she was so much more than just that. She existed outside of and beyond her role in my life as a mother. She was complex, she was strong and ultimately she taught me how to love…I miss her a lot. I miss our banter, our dark jokes, our particular love for each other. But in so many ways I’ve realized that she’s not really gone. She lives on in me and is in the love I have for others. So she will always be with me, even if she’s no longer with us. And the same is true for every other person she’s ever touched. She will always be my idol.

    Thanks for the kittens, mom.

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  • The Real Reason People Want To Burn Down The Bop House

    OnlyFans model Sophie Rain became a topic of conversation when it was revealed that she made $43,000,000 in the first year of opening her account. Her success started a debate online about normalizing sex work to very young women as Rain is currently 20 years old, but for many people, appears to be underage. Many of the women I follow who speak out about sexism were drawn to this story as it seems to highlight men’s desire for very young women. A desire that has historically resulted in the abuse of women and girls that is maintained beneath the patriarchy. Rain took her earnings and decided to open up the “Bop House”, the first OnlyFans content creator house. Taking a page from the Youtube content creator house, The Hype House, these Gen Z sex workers live together, work together and use each other’s platforms to cross promote. They predominately promote their content through apps like Tiktok and Instagram where the Bop House has gained a large following; some of it underage. They participate in many trends, and even create their own. In one trend they created, they put out an open call for auditions and of course some of the girls who answered were underage. Right now, the highest requested new member of the Bop House is a 17 year old blogger named Piper Rockelle. Rockelle is no stranger to content homes. She, along with her mother, started a teenage content home called “The Squad” in 2020 that would dissolve after her mother, Tiffany Smith was accused of pressuring the female members of the house to be more sexual, wear tighter clothes and placate to a male gaze. While she made those comments about the girls in the home, she also made a slew of sexually inappropriate comments towards some of the boys. Today, Tiffany Smith runs Piper Rockelle’s Brand Army account; which, similarly to OnlyFans, offers members access to exclusive pictures and videos for a small subscription fee. Based on the comments some other content creators were able to find on her Brand Army account, it’s clear that Piper Rockelle’s content, while not overtly explicit, is catering to an audience that wants to pleasure themselves to images of underage girls. And unfortunately, this is a growing trend among content creators who start as child bloggers. Piper Rockelle would appear in several social media videos with members of the Bop House, even a video “welcoming” her into the content house; to which they claim to have meant the physical home, not sex work.

    Listening to these young women respond to criticism around their actions, it becomes pretty clear that their brains are still developing. There are judgement calls that they’ve made hastily, and of course that calls into question whether or not these young women are able to truly make these decisions with a full understanding of their consequences. The Bop House has been the source of much debate, especially as other content houses inspired by them start to appear. A content house full of tattooed and edgy models called “The Alt Bop House” has invigorated a conversation about fetishizing alternative women, with many saying that sex work is the antithesis to what they call “alternative principles”. As a goth who is a former sex worker, I have a lot of things to say about many aspects of this and I had a very interesting experience that touched at the heart of this issue while I was working on my script for my Youtube channel.

    When I was 19 years old, I was scouted by a porn company. In 2009, I was in my first few years of college, my family had stopped financially supporting me and I was at the very start of my hormonal transition. Living in Valencia, at the time, it was very hard for me to find normative work. Especially being one of the few black people, and one of the few trans people in the area. It was virtually impossible for me to find employment and legalized protections for trans people wouldn’t exist until 2010. So when this scout from a porn company approached me at a sex party, it was a proposition I considered.

    At the time, this very successful transgender porn company was running a full service porn studio, an online portal for web camming and a night at a strip club. I knew a girl who worked at the club and I’ve always loved to dance, so I considered it… but then I became mortified about anyone seeing me, so I opted for the cam girl thing instead. I’m pointing out my logic here because back in that time, it was pretty feasible that you could be a cam girl and be relatively unknown, where as it was very hard to be a successful dancer and also be unknown. Most of the dancers were also either working for the cam studio or in the porn studio and their dance sets were really just a way to meet and greet their fans and potentially new customers. Back then, I had a lot of fear around my parents finding out and I didn’t want anyone to know I did porn so cam girl felt like a good choice.

    I feel like I need to draw attention to the fact that at 19, I wasn’t doing well. I had been in the full swing of my hypersexuality because of sexual violence phase and I first gained the attention of the scout through my pictures that I’d post of myself on social media. Often times, my pictures were suggestive or flirty. I wanted to be seen as sexy, really, before I had a good sense of my own sexuality. As a teenager, I had an awareness of men’s attraction to me, but I didn’t necessarily understand what it was supposed to be for me. My hypersexuality was set off by being drugged and assaulted by this artist I was working with when I was 15. I was focused on making money so that I could move out of my parents house and finally be myself, so I found this guy online who gave me a job in his studio. Then he raped me and because I needed money, I kept coming back. My groomer also gave me the perfect space to be myself and be creative. It just came at a cost. After that, I’d try my best to repeat these experiences but do so in a way that made me feel empowered and that’s how I got to sex parties where in retrospect, I was abused much more, but felt it was empowering. Some perv took me to my first party the week I turned 18, and for a while, I’d say that I was servicing these parties, almost as if I was an employee. This is the mindset that allowed sex work to feel like not that big of a deal.

    Back then, if you wanted to get into sex work, you really only had the option to do so through a larger company. They controlled distribution and had the large platforms to promote models and you would have to hustle way more and have way more resources to be able to do it independently. What this meant was that our income was often split between both the platform and the company I was working under. I remember thinking that being a cam girl would be easy, but I figured out pretty quickly that sex work is work.

    In many ways, sex work is all about selling a fantasy. In my actual life, I’m a femme bottom who is completely submissive. But when you have a body like mine, it’s harder to sell that fantasy. These men wanted me to perform a type of dominance and aggression that I do not really have. The audience doesn’t really want who you really are, they want a fantasy that suits your appearance. That draws them in, but if you want to get them to stay, you have to change it up. You change your hair, your body, your aesthetic, your vibe to draw in new customers and to keep your existing ones who may have tastes that shift. You have to think about marketing yourself in a way that you probably don’t actually want to. And while I was doing this, the porn company was making most of the money. I’m not proud to say that in my short 3 month stint as a cam girl, I made under a thousand dollars. Which was more than I had before, but at this point in my life, I really recognize how much I was getting screwed because I make that in a much shorter period of time in a way that I don’t feel exploited. I didn’t like being a cam girl. I’d go as far as to say that I hated it and it kinda ruined my sexuality for a bit; and I’m only really just now starting to feel like I have an accurate relationship with my sexuality. However, apparently I still have that sex worker stink on me.

    After doing cam work, I got out of sex work, but would continue doing a lot of sex work-like things. I relied very heavily on men because they had the money. I would sabotage aspects of my education to spend time with a man because he had money and wanted to take care of me. I got hurt a lot before I graduated college and eventually fell in love and desperately wanted to put all of that behind me.

    My ex almost dumped me when he found out that I was a cam girl in my past. He had exes who were sex workers and he didn’t have a fond opinion of them. I remember feeling like I was better than other trans women because I no longer had to do sex work; to the point were I’d deny that I ever did it. He picked me, and I was special because I was better than a sex worker. But there was a shift in our relationship as I started to become mores successful as a content creator. Eventually, I started making more money than him and started paying all of our rent. As I matured, he purchased more Funkos, smoked more weed and would bring home plates of his mother’s Lasagna after I’d slaved over a stove while he was at work. He started to feel undermined by me because I no longer needed him. Because I started making enough money to no longer need his permission or guidance. I remember finally getting to a place of financial comfort and many of the ways that I relied on men, I was very relieved to not “have” to do anymore. Looking back, I overlooked a lot of abusive behavior from men because they had money and were attracted to me enough to want to support me. As I type this, I’m giggling at the previous version of myself that wanted to be a house wife. I’m glad I out grew that. I’m glad I never married that guy.

    Moving to LA, it struck me almost immediately that men had a certain response to me having money. Up to this point, I had lived in conservative communities for most of my life. I was stealth before moving to LA and if I’m being honest, I had a hard time adjusting to the more liberal environment. In the OC, it was a bit more socially acceptable for me to kinda expect for men to pay my way, and I’d honestly became kinda used to that. But in LA, I wanted to be empowered. There were many times when I’d go out on a date with a man and when the check came, I’d grab my card and naturally want to pay my portion; I was proud to do so. And there were men who’d flinch at me for doing so. To many of them, it was an affront to their masculinity that I not only wanted to pay, but was able to pay. Most of the time I’d pay my portion, those relationships ended. In the OC, whenever I’d be out by myself, the men around me would ask me where my children were or if I had a husband. It was as if they expected for women to only exist in relation to men, who of course have the money in the relationship. I was a bit younger back then, but I could tell that there were men that were kinda disturbed by this reality of me being able to do these things for myself. Sure, men in LA are a bit more overtly liberal, but I find that a lot of men struggle to be with women who make more than them, because they rely on their finances to command power in their relationships. That’s also why so many red pilled men shame women for wanting to date men who are financially secure.

    These days, I live relatively comfortably, by myself in a cute little apartment in Hollywood. While I have my partners who do indeed do a lot for me, I do not rely on them financially. I don’t do a bit of handy work around my home, but I don’t really rely on them for anything other than companionship and the time we spend on this rock together. Plainly put, I do not need men and have not needed men in a very long time. My job as a content creator is one that has become lucrative enough for me to be comfortable. I work hard, I don’t exploit myself in the way I once did, and I’m very proud of myself for it. Sex work was a way I pulled myself up, but now it feels like a footnote. Nothing at all comes up when I look up my old stage name and the evidence of my sex work has evaporated as websites got updated and the online atmosphere for sex workers changed. But still, like I said, even after a lot has changed, apparently I’ve got that sex worker stink on me.

    I go to the Goth club every Wednesday night. It’s basically my religion at this point. I go there, I see my friends, I catch up with them, I commune with them. I feel very at home in the Goth community. My ex fetishized alternative women, but would shame me a lot for my alternative aesthetic when we first started dating so I was slowly weened out of it. It’s been nice to marinate in LA for a while now and really find myself again.

    After the club, I usually go to an after hours. I wouldn’t suggest this, but it is certainly a thing I’ve taken to. I don’t do coke and I’m not looking to fuck, I’m just an insomniac who really enjoys meeting people. I was sheltered for so long in the OC that I’m honestly still adjusting to how interesting people are in LA. Not that there weren’t interesting people in the OC; they were just playing a particular role. in the OC, you only really found out who people were when they had a bit of liquor in them and were around friends. People are more out there in LA and I kinda like that.

    The after hours I go to is in this small little house off the boulevard. Tucked away in a quiet little corner. It’s run by a former gang member who I will often see on the boulevard; a nice guy who’s really all about his business. The space isn’t large, but there are several stages for girls who want to dance. I know the guy who runs the girls who dance there; also a nice guy from what I can tell; you never really know. Men come to this little house to meet people, to socialize and yeah, sometimes to pay for dances. Sometimes we have to clear out of a section of the club so that the girls can give special dances to the men who have the funds for them. Perhaps this seems like a strange environment for me to be in, but of the after hours I’ve gone to, this is the one that feels the most chill. Every after hours is going to have a presence of drugs and sex work. They just go hand in hand and late at night, after the bars close, there’s a demand for both.

    Every time I go to this after hours, I end up meeting this guy. He’s a handsome man with a darker complexion, and a very pleasant speaking voice. I think we both registered that we do public speaking and so when we have interacted with each other, we end up having some surprisingly articulate conversations and verbal sparring matches. Perhaps this is the trauma, but I kinda like being able to argue with men, especially when I know they’re attracted to me. There’s something really sweet about being able to twist a conversation a certain way because you know the person wants you. And this guy has always been very clear about wanting me, even as I relented.

    This is an older guy and I think perhaps for that reason, he has always had a very hard time wrapping his mind around what I do for a living, and he also had a hard time understanding my polyamory. So we often get into these debates about these things where he essentially reveals that he doesn’t really believe me. He doesn’t believe that I have multiple partners who care about me and he doesn’t believe that I have been able to pay my rent and more from my earnings as a content creator. The way he responds to me is as if he believed that I was saying these things to simply cope. Keep in mind, he’s doing copious amounts of cocaine most of the time we are speaking and I’m usually drinking a white claw because to me they’re somewhere between a drink and a glass of water. But still, he did entertain me and I was attracted to him. I’ve accepted long ago that more people do coke than I recognized and while I think its a stupid drug, I don’t really judge people for doing it, just abusing it.

    I’ve known this guy for a while now so when he begged to go back to my place for a drink, I unfortunately entertained the idea. Maybe just because I wanted to go home. So we went back to my place and he navigated through the artistic clutter in my apartment to my kitchen where he rummaged through my bar, found the most expensive bottle of liquor and poured himself a large drink that he did not want to finish. This really annoyed me and then he asked me another annoying question as he looked around my apartment, which I will admit is a bit nicer than your average apartment in LA. He asked me how much I paid in rent and I didn’t really want to answer this question, but as I thought of a tactful way to respond, I blurted out

    “Unless you plan on paying my rent, I don’t really think I need to tell you how much I pay”

    He stumbles into my kitchen to find himself a plate that he could use to snort drugs off of and I get into my bed, defensively, under my covers. I really regret inviting this man into my house, but we carry on our conversation. I start trying to talk to him about what I’m working on as he looks around my apartment fascinated by the corners of unfinished art projects and my filming set up. I tell him that I’m working on a piece about this only fans creator home and the conversation quickly derails into a question I’ve now become kinda used to hearing”

    “Are you on Only Fans?”

    Whenever I tell people that I’m an online content creator and they meet me in a goth club where my tits are typically hoisted up to my chin, they often assume I’m using a euphemism about sex work. I suppose it’s true that many of the women I know at the club also have only fans; which is part of why the criticism of the Alt Bop house is so strange to me. Sex workers are a huge part of the goth community and many of the commodified aspects of alternative culture are directly inspired by the presence of BDSM fashion in these spaces. Most of these things are associated with each other because the Goth scene is one full of misfits and weirdos and those on the margins. Naturally, many sex workers feel embraced there. While it is indeed frustrating that many men see alternative women and fetishize them, it’s silly to ignore the sex worker presence in the goth scene; and to be fair, it hasn’t just been men who’ve assumed that I was a sex worker.

    What bothered me though is that this man has had many conversations with me about my job, he’s even met some of my fans who occasionally end up at the after hours. However, he still believed that once he got me alone, I’d somehow reveal that I was indeed a sex worker and that all the things I have did not come from my hard work, but from a man. He started to ask me if I had ever been behind on rent; and I’m very happy to report that I’ve never managed to struggle in that way. We never returned to our friendly banter about my latest project. Instead, he propositioned me.

    I will not get into the details of what he offered, but he wanted to establish a relationship with me where he comes over to my place every day and I service his very taboo fetish. In exchange, he’ll pay all of my rent and then some…and what he was asking for, while strange, wasn’t something I necessarily minded doing…but daily?? For some reason that really stood out to me.

    Because I tend to socialize in after hours like I’m observing people’s personalities, I hadn’t really fully calculated some of the aspects of our interactions. During our conversation, he as begging me to show him my Youtube channel, and the thing is, I already have. I showed it to him and one of the first things he said about my channel, which isn’t about my appearance, was that he didn’t like my nails being as long as they were and that he preferred me with more natural makeup. I dismissed it at the time, but as he sits at the foot of my bed, using my sewing table as a platform for him to snort drugs from, I finally started to get a fuller picture.

    When you’ve been liberated from men’s financial control for so long, you can forget how it works. You can forget that when men feel like they can control you through finances, that they also believe they can control everything about you. Seeing him every day and doing what he wanted me to do everyday, would have worn away at my spirit. Sure, I’d get my rent paid, but now this man has control over me every single day. I couldn’t share what I shared with him, with anyone else if I was in this agreement with him. It started to register to me that this man was actually frustrated with the fact that I wasn’t in a position where I was struggling so much that I’d entertain his offer. There were much sadder, much more dejected times in my life where I’d probably jump at the chance, but now? I’m not remotely close to needing it and I can tell that many men do not like that.

    I can understand why many people take issue with the Bop House specifically, I also feel that much of the criticism is done without an understanding of how the industry has changed. When I did sex work, it was during an era where porn producers and pimps relied on the desperation of the young, often abused women who came to them looking for a way to do sex work lucratively. These companies and these pimps felt like the safest way to do sex work and many women were abused. Many sex workers still are, but OnlyFans has indeed, changed the game for many sex workers.

    These days, if I wanted to be a cam girl, I could easily make my own account on a website like Chaturbate and start earning income without the help of a porn company. I’d still have to split my income a bit, but I could control my content. I could own it and I could produce it all myself. Expensive studios and cameras have been replaced with smart phones on tripods. OnlyFans models can simply upload their content and advertise it to people around the world very easily through twitter and now apps like Instagram and Tiktok. The reason why the Bop House is on these apps to begin with has to do with FOSTA SESTA laws which have made it so that sex workers can’t communicate their services through the platforms they were once able to. These laws were made to prevent human trafficking, but in all reality, they prevent of-age sex workers from using the promotional platforms they’ve been using. For many sex workers, these laws have pushed them offline back onto the streets and back underneath the thumb of exploitative pimps.

    On Red Pill podcasts, you will commonly see men hold court around how degrading it is to be an OnlyFans model, but they will invite them onto their show to be degraded and ironically, this functions as self-promotion for their OnlyFans. In that way, I think the irony is on full display. There are an increasing amount of angry men who take issue with feminism and the progress it’s given to women, but those same men will complain about being a traditional man who provides for his wife. Yet there’s also men who feel frustrated that women feel entitled to their money, who also believe that when they become rich, famous and hot, they should be able to have as many barely legal girlfriends they want. Then there are men who want to see the money they spend as a downpayment on sexual favors, who absolutely resent sex workers. For many anti-feminist men, OnlyFans models represent the fall of man-kind; the end of “western civilization”. They see women who sell sex as a sort of infinite-money-hack, as these days, women can do sex work without a man in the middle. It used to be that because men took most of the money from the girls who worked for them, that many sex workers were stuck in perpetual poverty. Poverty that ensured that these young women always had a reason to come back to sex work and to use these men as middle men. But now that men are no longer benefiting from pimping in the same way and these women are able to make most of the profits, as these women come out and start sharing the numbers, of course these men are going to be upset. They’ve never made 43 million in a year. In their mind, why should she? She’s a whore!

    While I think it’s worth discussing why models like Sophie Rain are successful and its worth criticizing how the Bop House promoted a teen who’s likely already being exploited, I think the anger people have for these women is misplaced in many ways. What people are really responding to is the fact that sex work is no longer underground. Our society has humanized sex workers so much during my lifetime, to the point where I can think of several who have fairly vanilla Hollywood personas now. With that has come improved conditions for sex workers, and are things perfect? Not really. However, what many don’t seem to be understanding is that while pushing these women off social media may seem like a solution to you, disempowering and shaming them makes the abuse porn producers, traffickers and pimps want to accomplish, much easier.

    Shame is a big reason why many women who do sex work never report anything that happens to them. The attitude many have of dismissing and discarding sex workers is the same social attitude that encourages abuse towards them. For those personally affected by the patriarchy, it may feel empowering to shame women who do sex work because they are a tangible and precise target. However, since capitalism has existed and patriarchy was established to feed it, there have always been men who were willing to pay to have access to women, and women whose circumstances have been that their only path to financial mobility is a man. For as long as women have been able to have their own bank accounts, men have conflated our outward expressions of femininity as not that far from sex work. My experiences in multiple ends of this has made it very clear to me that at the heart of this anger around OnlyFans models is a resentment for women being able to become so financially comfortable that she objectively does not need a man. Men look at a gorgeous young woman like Sophie Rain and they resent that the closest they’ll ever get to her is being a paid member of her audience. Her financial freedom reinforces to them that she will never be so disempowered that she’d need to settle for them. That if she ever did date them, it wouldn’t be because they were the richest, hottest, coolest guy; as red-pillers like to suggest. She’ll date them because, well she chooses to; and its become clear to me that many men resent women being able to choose anything for themselves.

    I think the subject of choice is worth considering because ultimately, many of these choices are simply illusions. I guess you could say that I chose to do sex work, but only because my other options were starving, with no school books and no medical care. No one wanted to pay me to flip burgers, but they would pay me to flip them on their backs. I don’t think most people who end up doing sex work would necessarily choose it. I know a lot of sex workers, but very few who I’d say loved their job the way I love mine. But what I’ve learned is that this can be said about most jobs. Sex work is only degrading if you see it as such, and in many ways, I actually think it’s much more degrading to let a corporation use your body and labor to maintain something you will never own that never feeds back into you beyond a small paycheck and then discards you once you fall out of line. I had a negative experience as a sex worker and I’m glad its no longer my gig, but if I got into it now, who knows. I hated taking off my clothes and being paid pennies for it. I hated how isolated I felt within it and I hated having to depend on men.

    Sophie Rain and many other OnlyFans models have come out to say that young girls shouldn’t quit their day jobs for OnlyFans fame. That only happens to a very small amount of people. Most OF creators make just above minimum wage. I don’t think young girls are turning to OnlyFans creators and viewing them as role models, and if they are, I’d like to speak to their parents. Frankly, I think that’s where most of the blame should be placed. Tiffany Smith is feeding her daughter to the sharks because it pays to do so, and that’s very sad to me. More than these sex workers, I believe we should criticize the capitalism that would allow her to feel completely fine selling her daughter. Would she do that if it didn’t pay?

    Sex work is work and we only think of it as easy because we view sexuality through a certain lens because of how sex factors into our lives. However anyone whose done sex work will tell you that if you think it’ll be easy, you will fail. As sex workers have built and gained their own platforms, they can have open conversations about that. To me, it’s hard to get the impression that sex work is glamorous if you’ve heard those conversations. Frankly, sex workers make it look easy, but that’s also part of the job. I personally find what I do now to be much easier. I found out pretty quickly that i don’t quite have the heart for it and I’m not very good at pretending.

    At the end of the day, this is all marketing. The Alt Bop House is not catering to teenagers who are alternative who care about “alternative principles”, they’re catering to men who fetishize alternative women; and if you are one you know they don’t really like them, they just view them as more adventurous than the women they typically go for. They are selling a fantasy the way we are incentivized to do so under capitalism. About 6 months ago, some of you may have noticed that I have started playing up my appearance and have committed to a certain aesthetic on my Youtube channel. I’m also more overtly flirtatious and I’ve finally started wearing bras on camera (lol). Since I’ve made that change, my following has grown dramatically and I’ve made twice as much. On Patreon, I went back and forth with my audience about shifting into “Kat Blaque, the character” and that’s what you now see on my Youtube channel. It’s still me, but it’s a very curated, hotter version of me. My experience with sex work has made it so that I honestly have really struggled around the idea of putting myself together to film Youtube content. I hate the idea of selling my appearance, but I had to shift my thinking around this and I’m glad that I have. Now I see it all as a work uniform of sorts. Soft makeup, a Victoria Secrets push up bra and Jovi by Outre teased up to remind my audience that I’m a Goth without dark makeup that often distracts my viewers. It’s a look that’s worked; it’s a fantasy that sells. I could argue with myself all day about how I’m reinforcing some unhelpful things by leaning into these things so heavily, but at the end of the day, whether I wear a bra or not, whether I wear makeup or not, I alone will not defeat this societal trend of expecting women to be glamorous and presentable within the industry I work in and it doesn’t serve me to act as if it is my responsibility, because it isn’t. In fact, I’d say that trying to make it seem as if it is, does a great job of providing cover for the much harder to destroy societal reality of patriarchy.

    These sex workers are easier to blame than the men who patronize them, but the demand for them will continue to exist whether or not they’re on the main stage or in the shadows. Personally, I like that things have gotten so much better for sex workers that they can finally get paid what they deserve without having to hand their paychecks to a man first and I will always support improved conditions for sex workers over blaming them for being sex workers. To me, that argument is no different from “what was she wearing”. It’s easier to criticize the clothes a particular woman was wearing than it is to deconstruct a rape culture that says if certain women look a certain way, they should expect abuse. But we lean into those half baked ideas because they’re easier to latch onto and we want to maintain the stigma around women dressing immodestly, and therefore maintain a central part of controlling women. There’s a reason why rich men who’ve historically abused women and participated in human trafficking are suddenly trying to “protect women” by creating laws that make it easier for them to keep sex workers and their abuse of them, in the underground.

  • The Problem With Madeline Pendleton

    For the past week, I’ve been getting dogpiled by the audience of a content creator whose election discourse I quite lightly criticized. However, at the end of it all, this TikTok creator and owner of a brand called Shop Tunnel Vision would dismiss me as the “ultimate ID Politic Villain” and argue to her audience that I was simply a Democrat sent by the CIA in favor of the DNC. That’s right, Kat Blaque, the Democrat; a laughable concept to most who are familiar with my content. While this discourse annoyed me, like previous discourses, I’ve learned a lot and have many observations. I felt it would be productive to spell some of those out, so here we go.

    Donald Trump is our president, and he ran on the platform of explicitly targeting the transgender community and our access to gender affirming care. In addition to that, he’s built alliances with white nationalist groups who have cells in every state, in every major city. Just today I saw a video of a masc lesbian in Tucson, Arizona (where my parents used to live) being escorted out of the bathroom because they thought she was transgender. The same day, I saw that Arizona Republicans advanced a bill that would allow for execution by fire squads and gas chambers. As we speak, immigrants are being loaded into camps and even those with legal citizenship are experiencing the tangible reality that they may indeed be deported. As our de-facto president, Elon Musk, goes onto stage and does a “roman salute” after thanking trump voters for “saving civilization”, it’s very clear to me that we are headed for a genocide. One that many will turn a blind eye to, and even overtly support. As I’ve written about a few times on here, I have been preparing for this for quite some time. I spend my days wondering if anything I’ve done will last beyond me. I’ve never particularly cared about my legacy until it seemed quite tangible to me that I may not die of old age. As people in his cabinet state that they would like to “eradicate trans people from public life”, it’s not conspiratorial for me to see the writing on the wall. For that reason, I felt a certain way during the election cycle when I observed people who aren’t going to be as targeted as I express indifference to the threat of a Trump presidency and dismiss the only tangible path we had to defeating Donald Trump; Kamala Harris.

    Contrary to many people’s racist assumptions, I am not a Democrat. I’d actually say that most of my family doesn’t identify as Democrat. Sure, many of us vote for Democratic candidates, but that’s largely because we have a good perception of the overt ways that the right have been, for decades, attempting to remove the impact of The Civil Rights Act. It’s been long established that if the Republicans weren’t so racist, many black people would vote Republican because of our trend of social conservatism. I’ve lived and socialized in predominately white conservative communities since I was very young. I’d say for the past 8 or so years that I’ve been in the city, I’ve never known more left leaning people. When I first moved here, I started dating a few dudes who were in the DSA. After a lifetime of dating conservative and conservative-adjacent men, I wanted to date someone who’d actually care about me. But perhaps because these men were white, something stood out to me.

    One guy I tried to date took me to a protest where a black mother was speaking out about her child being gunned down by the police while they were unarmed. During her impassioned, tear filled speech, the guy I was dating and his DSA buddies scribbled sayings in chalk, I’d say less than 100 feet from the mother as she gave her speech. I can’t remember the poppy leftist phrases they scribbled, but I know that if I were speaking passionately about racialized violence and the loss of my child’s life, it would be easy for me to see what they’re doing as a lack of empathy. It would be easy for me to recognize that they weren’t particularly invested in my son. The dude I was dating grew up with money and had deep resentment for some of the people he grew up around. For him, leftism was rebellion. For me, it’s a path out of a caste system that requires I exist at the very bottom. There’s a reason they felt they could fuck around specifically at that moment.

    Madeline Pendleton is someone I followed many years ago as a person who admired her brand and its principles. Honestly, I wish I had limited my following of her to Instagram or a platform other than TikTok. I say that because while I appreciated much of the socialist content she posted, I’d also become perceptive of the fact that Madeline has a bit of a pattern of getting into it with black women; and that was on full display during Kamala Harris’ last minute presidential run.

    As someone who had already been comprehending their own genocide, there was a part of me that understood the excitement people had for Harris. In many ways, she represents a perfect foil to Donald Trump. Harris has worked in every branch of the government; she’s clearly very intelligent and has a record of being a champion for the LGBT community. She’s the product of an interracial relationship and in many ways embodies the modern woman that Trump and his ilk are trying to stifle…. but at the end o f the day, she’s a Democrat. Like most politicians operating in this two party system, she is going to speak out of both sides of her mouth. When Kamala lost, some Democrats blamed trans rights, that Harris wasn’t particularly aggressive about protecting; even saying that she will “follow the law” of the state. The Democrats have run on the platform of not being Donald Trump for far too long. While I think Harris’ campaign was impressive in that it managed to gain so much support so soon, I also think that the Democrats, while marginally better than the Republicans, would still be my foe at the end of the day. I have no love for them and I’ve often said that if you ever see me advocating for a presidential candidate… that’s not me. That’s a Cylon.

    I say all of that to say that while I am no fan of Kamala Harris, I see the tangible reasons why vulnerable people would want to vote for her. For that reason, I did not publish content during the election that would otherwise discourage people from voting for Kamala Harris. That’s actually why I almost never post election content; I’m weary of the ways my platform can impact other people and have never believed in telling people how to vote. Your vote is yours and I suppose I come from an area where it’s quite odd to speak about who you voted for (but again, I was raised in a conservative area and I’m sure that had something to do with it).

    During the election cycle, I saw a lot of content from Madeline Pendleton targeting the Democrats and their voters. Madeline, like many, took issue with Kamala Harris’ stance on Israel. While Trump planned to “finish the job” and establish a resort town on the bodies of dead Gazans, Kamala called for a ceasefire and ultimately, a two-state solution. Neither of these outcomes are desirable, but they are materially different. Many people on social media have just discovered that for 70+ years, there has been an ongoing genocide in Palestine. In truth, the “conflict” is much older, but today, Israel is supposed to represent a bastion of European civilization to be contrasted against the barbarism of the Middle East. And it’s for that reason that many simply want to do away with the Palestinians.

    My partner of 4.5 years (Edward) is Palestinian. His father used to play soccer for Palestine and he was apparently pretty good at it. So good that he was shot by an IDF soldier, as a show of power. According to Edward, his father soon made plans to leave the country during a time when he still could do so. When asked I asked Edward who his father voted for, he said “Kamala,” and both of us followed suit because he recognized, as I have, that the genocide will happen either way and will not be undone overnight. It’s an uncomfortable decision you make when you live in the empire. If you vote, you’re essentially forced to choose the “lesser of two evils” or one of the third party options, which never win. This is partially why I don’t always see it as productive to act like making one of those choices is necessarily reflective of someone’s character. To me, voting is the butt plug of politics. It’s there, and it’s useful, but hopefully it leads to something else. In a very similar way, Palestinians voted for Hamas. Many Palestinians have opposed their actions and ideology, but they recognized that they were their main path to liberation. And for that reason, many have believed that all Palestinians should die for how they chose to vote in an environment where they only had one tangible way out. My position has always been not to punish those people for being forced to make an uncomfortable choice. One many of us who’ve experienced oppression are often forced to make to survive. When I told my partner about Madeline’s content, he said, “That’s so white”.

    Much of Madeline’s content during the election surrounded the idea that the Democrats were “evil”. She would share that a company approached her to create content that encouraged people to vote Democrat and broadcast to her audience of over a million people that if they saw someone creating content in support of Kamala Harris, they were likely paid to make that content. The result of that post was that many black women who created pro-Kamala content were accused of being “shills for the DNC”. When she shared the name of the company and people were able to look the company up, it resulted in many people dogpiling the list of creators, who were primarily black women and attacking them for being paid to make content for the Democrats. The insinuation was that their support was disingenuous, indifferent to genocide and even advocating for it.

    To me, this was a big nothing-burger. Content creators should be paid handsomely for their time and many content creators genuinely support Kamala Harris and still oppose the actions of Israel. Many of these black women were outspoken about that, but largely because of Madeline’s content, they were dogpiled by her rabid fanbase, who didn’t seem to understand that these companies aren’t paying influencers for endorsements, but for doing the work they’ve already done. The idea that these companies are paying these creators to superficially support Kamala Harris is not only unfounded and conspiratorial, but it’s just not how these campaigns work. These companies do not need to pay random content creators to pretend they support Kamala Harris. Most of the time, these companies pay creators to make content about policies and to communicate certain political issues. This content isn’t a money-maker for most who create it, but it is hard and often thankless work. Content creators have the ability to create content that effectively communicates certain ideas and I think that expertise is worth paying for. What Madeline tried to suggest was that these creators were being paid for their endorsement, and she failed to recognize that not every video published by a person who was supporting Kamala Harris was being paid for, and that its rather bog-standard for them to pay for creators to make content, but not really in the way she was suggesting.

    Additionally, one of the issues I believe the left isn’t very perceptive of is the fact that for decades now, the right has deeply and heavily invested in promoting right-wing content and giving it an air of authority. As a long-time content creator who interacted with these people, I’ve seen the cameras get nicer, and the sound get better, the studios get built and the shows get green-lit. Billionaires invest a lot of money into right-wing content that defends capitalism and excuses the actions of the state. And we see that right now, Trump is asking for social media figures to help him establish state media, which will function as a propagandizing tool to manipulate the populace. They’re well aware of the power of social media and its impact, and to be frank, creators like myself aren’t likely to be approached by the Democrats, nor are we likely to be funded by billionaires. I’m too far left for the Dems. I got invited to the White House once; it was chill, but I kept my Doc Martens on.

    While I had already unfollowed Madeline during this time because of her praise of North Korea, I still managed to see her content in my feed, along with her snide and shitty comments underneath black women’s videos even as someone who understood the substance of her disagreement and technically agreed, it was strange to me that she chose to focus so much of her energy and time onto responding to black women in a particular way. A way that often mimicked the very anti-blackness that most black women were afraid of Kamala experiencing. 

    During the election cycle, I sat through a lot of videos about how Kamala Harris wasn’t particularly intelligent, didn’t have any solid plans and could barely articulate her points. This was quite odd to me because when I observed Kamala Harris, she was very obviously incredibly intelligent and well-spoken, especially when put up against Donald Trump. Kamala has objectively accomplished more and was far more qualified for the job than any other candidate. But even though she didn’t make her race or gender central to her campaign, there were people on both the left and the right who believed that she was predominately riding on those qualities. They naturally assumed that if they saw black women supporting Harris, it was purely because they were black. And perhaps in a way that’s true in the sense that black women, because of our experiences, tend to be more community-minded, which to many people, should be the focus of the President. I don’t doubt that many DID vote for her because she is a black woman, but I know that she didn’t run on that and I personally voted for her because like 92% of black women, I properly understood the threat of Donald Trump. I was in my last year of stealth when he came into office and many years before that, I had existed during a time where legal protections did not exist for transgender women such as myself. I do not want to go back.

    When I was a teenager, I came out as Gender Queer, but despite my androgyny, my body was developing in a rather feminine way. I didn’t quite understand why older men started giving me so much attention, but as I reached hiring age, I started going out and trying to find work. Being a trans kid meant that I was almost immediately dismissed when I tried to pursue work. It probably didn’t help that I was one of the only black people in the community. But these men wanted to give me money. I found an artist in LA who’d hire me as his assistant. I would run away and dress how I wanted to dress in his studio where I’d often work late into the night. I was the “good” kid, and my parents didn’t check in on me that much. Too busy with work; and I didn’t wanna go home. One night he gave me a drink, and soon after, I woke up in his bed the following day. Knowing that I’d had my one of my first sexual experiences, but was not conscious for it. I worked for my groomer and first rapist for about a year and a half after. He was the only person giving me money; I needed it back then. I wanted to run away to LA and move out as soon as I turned 18. My father was bigoted, and my mother submissive to him. I wanted out. Men were my path out.  

    I started doing sex work because I needed access to hormones. I self-medicated from sketchy pharmacies I found online; getting my dosages from Yahoo groups. While my body was feminine, I knew that if I didn’t start, it wouldn’t remain that way. In California, you have to prove that you are on hormones the legal way. I wasn’t quite there yet; I couldn’t afford the therapy I was required in order to qualify for hormones. One therapy session costs about the same as a month of under-the-table HRT. At 19, I became a cam girl. I never sold sex, but I was signed to a relatively popular transgender porn company that I’d do webcam work for. It was incredibly degrading. I’d get paid pennies to do things I did not want to do. Eventually, I just started relying on men. Men gave me money and I lived to please and cater to them. I shifted my persona to satisfy them, losing a sense of what I wanted to do for myself. When I eventually got into a relationship that was monogamous, that stopped. By then, discrimination protections were added to the books, and it was no longer legal to discriminate against a transgender person. But I had already started to build my platform online and that helped me eventually reach a place of financial independence. I went full-time on Youtube in 2015 and decided to leave my partner who’d kept me behind the Orange curtain for 6 years; no plans to move to the city. When I dumped my ex and moved to LA, it was the first time in my life that I felt truly empowered. The first time in my life that I objectively did not need a man. By that time, I’d managed to go through the official process and changed both my name and gender marker. I finally felt functional after 27 years of life.

    I’ve had to endure a lot. Survival is in my spirit, and that’s largely why I did not want for what Trump is currently doing now to happen. While I can recognize that I may be, in many ways, safe as a “passing” trans woman whose documents are changed, who lives in California. I am incredibly worried about trans folks in red states who are going to be rapidly put into a position where they have to do what I’ve done to survive. This is the natural result of removing employment protections, forbidding us from using public restrooms, and making it legal for companies to deny services to transgender people. There will always be men eager to pay trans women money to exploit them. There will always be the underground of trans care. The girls before me had pumping parties and street mones. If you were a trans woman in the 70s or 80s and you didn’t come from money, your options were sex work, drag, stealth or not transitioning at all. Back then, you virtually had to pass as cis to be trans. I had to medically transition so that I could properly assimilate into femaleness and thus prove to society that I am truly a woman. It’s a process that I look back at and see as rather archaic and it’s a path that many no longer need to go through because of the progress our society has had, which is part of why there are “more” trans people these days. Care was more accessible and more people were able to be themselves. I think that’s a good thing. A thing worthy of protecting. 

    When I saw my feed responding to one of Madeline Pendleton’s comments underneath her video about whether or not she regrets her vote because of the impact anti-trans legislation and Trump’s promise to level Gaza saying, “I’m literally trans, and have Palestinian relatives”, I decided to respond to the now-deleted comment sharing my experiences as a person who survives because of my access to gender-affirming care. I detail my experience with exploitation and simply asked that people like Madeline Pendleton who do not rely on gender-affirming care, simply “read the room”. Madeline’s content, whether she meant for it to or not, had the impact of shaming people who voted for Democrats. I never argued that she necessarily swayed the vote; as in all reality, the Republicans got most of the vote because we are a more right leaning than some realize. She, along with many other so-called “leftists,” chanted the phrase, “a vote of Kamala is a vote for genocide”. And from where i’m sitting, it was impossible for me not to recognize that it’s pretty easy to feel that way when you’re a white person who isn’t medically transitioning for whom this genocide will not target.

    It was always fine to me that she voted for Claudia De La Cruz, the socialist candidate. After all, she’s in a blue state. What I took issue with was the lack of empathy she demonstrated during the election cycle. While she would eventually walk some of these comments back and state that she understood why certain people would vote for Kamala, to me that didn’t really ultimately matter. The impact of what she’s feeling is felt, and those of us who aren’t in a parasocial relationship with her aren’t likely to focus on her content enough to get every updated view of her stance. All I saw from my end, from her, not creators speaking about her, was the equation of Democrats and those who vote for them as evil. None of that needed to be said to advocate for the socialist candidate. Keeping in mind most of my reaction to this is based in my own sensibilities about voting and using your platform. Whether Pendleton is perceptive of this or not, Claudia De La Cruz, if elected, would still be complicit in genocide as the leader of the most violent imperialist country in the world. That’s in the job description. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t criticize it, but it was very silly to believe that in a country that supports Israel as much as we do, suddenly, our relationship with them would dissolve in this election. 

    This post, of course, dissolved into a mess. 

    My video reached just under a million views and it would eventually be brought to the attention of Madeline Pendleton. In her first video that she made about it, she said that she “doesn’t watch videos by small creators” in reference to me, and made a point of saying that she didn’t see my video, but did see a video about my video made by one of her mutuals; a white person. In her video, she responded to some of the growing discourse around my video. Despite spending the best part of the past 2 decades advocating against transmedicalism, many, mostly white, queer folks interpreted my video as “transmedicalist”.

    Transmedicalism is the idea that one must go through gender-affirming medical care to “truly” be transgender. For the reasons I laid out here, I’m staunchly opposed to this idea, but I do think there are tangible differences between a person who lives with gender dysphoria who requires HRT to make their lives liveable, and a non-dysphoric trans person may not exactly understand the degree of distress those of us who have dysphoria experience without access to hormones. At 34 going on 35, I’ve been on hormones now for 16 years. My body has adjusted to that and it’s what i’m used to. On weeks where I’m late on my shot, I notice the various, only perceptible to me, changes in my body’s functionality. It’s not a great feeling. Knowing that, I have empathy for those who vote for Kamala in order to defeat Trump, who ran on removing their care. And this is what got me called “transmedicalist”. 

    Madeline made a point of saying that she avoided watching my video because she believed it would be bad for her mental health, which of course, paints my video in an incredibly antagonistic way. My video never attacked her, it wasn’t rude, it wasn’t mean, it wasn’t made with the desire to take her down. It was simply a video where I, upon my initial understanding of her comment and the context in which it was made, wanted to point out that our situations are incredibly different, and that’s why I can’t afford to act like Trump isn’t a threat to me, and marginalized people generally. It’s easy to dismiss why some would vote a certain way when you aren’t as impacted by these things.

    Because of Madeline’s framing, I received a bunch of harassment from her audience, which focused on Madeline’s intentional misinterpretation. What made this very frustrating is that Madeline would start to delete content, and then deny that she said these things. Like I said, she had already deleted the original comment that I was responding to (which she claims was simply her correcting someone on misgendering her as a woman, which I think is her right). This is a well-documented pattern of hers. It was something I observed during the election. She’d say something crazy, then people would respond to it, then she’d delete it and outright deny she said anything. Then start posting content that made everyone who disagreed with her look silly because she’d say that they were, in some ways, in agreement with each other. I never disagreed with her vote, nor her socialism nor her criticism of the Democrats. She’d know that if she watched my video, but her reaction caused me to recognize that I’ve seen this pattern before.

    To me, Madeline represents a particular archetype I’ve engaged with quite a bit. An archetype that I now refer to as a “Pendelton”. In the vast majority of trans-specific spaces I’ve been in, there’s always a white, usually afab, usually non-transitioning person who is entirely resistant to centering anyone other than themselves and their experience with gender. Madeline is a Non-Binary person who uses all pronouns; and for the record, I think that’s incredibly valid. However, we have extremely different experiences and will factor into society quite differently.

    If Madeline was in Arizona, she can walk into the women’s restroom and not have the fear of being caught and put into a gas chamber if she’s caught being a trans person in the restroom. I’ve never had a problem using public restrooms because I “pass”. In a way, this is a privilege, but passing privilege is a sort of temporary privilege. When I was stealth, I had to ride a very very fine line. I had to perform a certain way and that was my survival. Sure, I can get away with it, but if I get caught, depending on the state, that may have severe consequences. A Pendelton type likes to ignore these tangible differences and tends to quite defensively respond to fairly neutral discussions of these differences. I had many white non-binary people express anger at my video, which simply stated that while we may both be under the trans umbrella, our chance of surviving a Trump administration is very different.

    Pendletons tend to dominate conversations and focus on “validity” while excusing or dismissing the value of trans people who medically transitioned and want to speak about their differences. It’s an odd reaction that stands out to me and it’s something I’ve interacted with many times over. Their reactions have the impact of essentially discouraging transitioning people from discussing their experiences. It’s clear that they tend to perceive a description of these experiences as a trump card of sorts. It’s a bizarre reaction to a request for empathy and understanding. From my observation, the vast majority of trans spaces prioritize the far more common Pendleton types over those of us who medically transition and deal with the complexities of transitioning gender. They will say “listen to black trans women” as a way of promoting themselves as authorities with good politics, but will see the discussion of intersectionality and how black trans women experience oppression as a waste of time that takes from them. We exist as deities and icons in those spaces, but our voices are rarely heard or centered. I estimate that if Madeline Pendleton were in community with trans people, she’d be familiar with my content (as we are close in age) and more intimately familiar with the tangible position trans women who existed before legal protections actually went through and would perhaps express herself differently. 

    My only point through all of this has been that she should have more empathy in expressing herself. What fascinates me is that she has a million followers but still feels like she must make certain statements. You get the impression that this was an absolutely necessary thing for her to express and post. Like someone made her make the content she made during the election; but would then deny she ever made it.

    There’s an incredible lack of tact and her persona shifts between platforms. Her Twitter is far edgier than her Tiktok and it doesn’t matter how many times she can say the Democrats are evil, she will still deny that she ever said that, even though millions of people saw it. Before watching my videos, Madeline started to spread the idea that the only reason I would make videos about her is because I was trying to make money. This was very upsetting because, as of now, I have made $151 on TikTok. That’s ten dollars more than before all of this started and this is actually my lowest earning in the past few months. I make much more money elsewhere. I had this conversation because I cared. I wanted to help expand her perspective because I’m personally impacted by it. While I gained a lot of followers from it, as a social media veteran, I’ll tell you that TikTok followers carry much less value in terms of how you translate that into money. Which is part of why I’m fascinated by Madeline’s over-blown ego around her followers. With respect, I am a much larger creator with a much more extensive career. It’s not a competition to me. It’s been very hard to stomach so many people reacting, not to me, but to a white person’s approximation of my position that another white person then criticized.

    While Madeline refused to engage with my first video (something I didn’t ask for or really want) because I was a “small creator” and it would be bad for her mental health, she went on to respond to much smaller creators… who were white. She stitched several videos by smaller white creators who spoke to her in a much more aggressive tone. This is a tone I’d struggle to take as a person who’s been raised around white conservatives. I have a default of niceness because I learned from a very young age that white people do not like confrontation, especially from someone with dark skin. They often have this sharp anxiety around me, as if they are waiting for me to be aggressive and angry. So I tend not to raise my voice or speak with anger because I assume that would mean they’d be more willing to hear what I had to say. But Madeline refused to watch my video and is still ranting about me as I type this on livestream. In her livestream, she’d describe me as “the ultimate ID politic villain” sent by the DNC to tear her down. She argued that she’d never go up against a black trans woman, because she’s not stupid and she doesn’t want to “dunk” on me to make me “look bad”… this is a very bizarre reaction to my first video. And from there, it became fairly clear to me: 

    Madeline Pendleton, like many white people, has a strong racial bias that has remained unexamined, and that’s at the core of all of this. 

    I do not doubt that Madeline keeps a quiver full of black people who agree with her in her vicinity, but in many ways, she’s still the sort of person who grabs her purse tight when walking by a black person on the street. Sure, she’s a socialist, but like many white people, she hasn’t quite unpacked whiteness and these patterns that she gets into; honestly because they were socialized within her. It’s incredibly hard to not fall into the tenants of whiteness when you haven’t examined them. It’s my observation that white leftists who tend to hate “identity politics” are simply white people who are truly afraid of examining their whiteness and understanding what that actually means. It’s why they can’t help but do things that many properly see as bigoted. If you go down that list, you’ll notice a lot of things fit: paternalism, deference for the written word, defensiveness, either/or thinking, fear of open conflict, individualism, and right to comfort, etc etc etc. All things she very clearly displayed in this interaction that she has never quite questioned of herself.

    What I perceived in this interaction is that she was incapable of processing that someone can disagree with them without attacking them.

    If you’ve followed her for any amount of time, you see her engage in discourse with white people who disagree with her and it’s not hard to get the sense that she’s more willing to hear out a white person over a black person. When she discovered that Ian Carrol of Cancel This Clothing Company had Nazi sympathies, she demonstrated an extreme amount of consideration for his position. She handled him with more respect than i’ve ever seen her give a black creator. There’s a reason she always imagines that black creators are attacking her and believes the only reason I’d ever say anything is that I was paid off by the DNC to specifically target her. It’s clear, even from this post, that Madeline sees this all as a game. A game for her to win that I didn’t know I was playing.

    Really what she’s saying in her live is just a justification for her not to engage with what a black person is saying. If you believe that you are so above every black person that you will always win every argument against them, and thus think you should not engage with them, that’s just racism. Her fans will struggle to get this, but as a long time content creator, I could certainly deal with her directly responding to my even toned, non aggressive, non confrontational video discussing our differences. To me there’s no tangible difference between saying that she “doesn’t want to dunk on me” to saying that she doesn’t believe in listening to me at all. Because that’s what happened. It’s paternalistic to frame me, a 34 year old woman who’s been harassed for a very long time, who’s still making content, as someone who simply can’t take it. It stands out as racist purely because when she decided to listen to someone about it, she made sure they were white.

    Despite my very publicly stated stances, Madeline has continued telling her audience that I am upset that she didn’t vote Democrat. You won’t find a video of me saying that, but that’s her story. That’s her narrative; her audience of a million simply believes her. It’s truly quite bizarre. The Democrats don’t want to work with me because…I’m not a Democrat. There’s a reason she received a hefty offer from the Dems, and I got one little non-partisan (but probably Dem) offer. Whiteness affords Madeline a degree of authority that allows her to amass a million followers despite her bad behavior and controversies. She wants to make this about me disagreeing with her socialist vote, when I’ve always argued that it’s about empathy. And she demonstrates that lack of empathy when she chooses to dismiss my video, the actual source of the discourse, in favor of white creators who often didn’t correctly represent me. Plainly stated, allowing a white person to define my character is a clear communication that you have a preference for white content creators; which may be why she’s completely unfamiliar with me despite the fact that I’ve created content about these issues for a very long time.

    After about a week of being dogpiled by her audience, she sent me this message.

    {“data”:{“product”:”tiktok”}}

    A message worded in a way that would seem to suggest that she wouldn’t attempt to dehumanize me. I received this message on the morning of the same day she would compare me to the “one-legged solo poly hijabi” meme that was quite popular among right-wingers. This reinforces the point I’ve made many times over about white leftists like Madeline Pendelton. To me, they are functionally the same as a conservative. It’s very clear to me that many of these particular, terminally online leftists have no real desire to build community. They want an exclusive book club that meets at the café. Like the dude I dated scribbling in front of a traumatized mother, it’s all about rebellion and edge. It’s not much more than that. I spend most of my time offline doing community organizing, which requires meeting people where they’re at. My group has grown quite a bit; people’s positions and ideas shift especially when they feel welcome; and I am incredibly thankful that I’ve been able to create the community I desperately needed. 

    One of the unintended side effects of all of this has been that many TikTok content creators have come to my defense. And many of them shared with me that my content helped them find themselves. I received so many comments from non-binary people who appreciated the work I’ve done to stand up for gender-expansive folks during the height of the popularity for transmedicalism. I saw trans person after trans person after trans person share that they came out as trans because of me. Apparently…I’ve raised an entire generation of transgender people. I genuinely had no clue. I recognized that I’ve made the work I’ve made, but I didn’t really see the impact. It hadn’t registered to me just how many trans people have seen my content and my community as a place where they feel seen and understood. There were people that I followed, who I admired in my way, and who came out to celebrate me, and it honestly healed me in many ways. I tend not to have a complex about my work, which I always see as imperfect and needing improvement. Even as I planned the exciting things I was working on, this discourse, while annoying, made me realize that my work would indeed live on long after I was gone. 

    To me, this entire conversation was about moving forward and communicating our goals and needs differently so that they can actually take root. You gain nothing from outright dismissing the needs of the marginalized and shaming them for what they do to pursue their own survival. Unfortunately, the right is already very aware of that, which is part of why so many left leaning people, voted for Trump this time around. Class reductionism naturally leads to a lot of people towards ignoring bigotry. And while, sure, these things are simply tools that capitalists use to manipulate us, their impact is real and none of these people conduct themselves as people who’ve unpacked that very caste system that places me at the bottom, them at top. We don’t need to be reminded of that caste system during a time where we are all scared, but I fear that for some on the left, it’s all they have. That will be an impediment to progress for as long as we decide to coalition build with the people like Madeline Pendleton.

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  • Loose Knots: My Black Transfemme Reality in the LA Rope Scene

    (photos by @MyPolyamLife)
    I’ve always been afraid of rope. I’ve always worried about being bound in a way where I can’t escape. I have a wasp in my chest that vibrates through me and keeps me moving. While I dash by people on the street, I’m always petrified of standing in someone’s way or frustrated with someone standing in mine. I struggle with stillness. I guess that’s why when Nathan initially told me he wanted to tie me up, it made me nervous.  

    When I first came into BDSM, I was giving myself permission. Permission to explore some of the things I suppose I’d always put into the category of deviant, unhealthy and strange. Like a lot of people, I was raised religiously. Not just religious, but also quite isolated socially within that religion. When you go to a Christian private school, your parents forbid you from watching secular media, and most of the people you know are from the church, everything outside of that bubble seems like it’s part of Satan’s clever plan. However, at that point in my life, I’d put aside that woo, while trying to open myself up to another. All with the desire to explore and perhaps learn something new about myself.  

    I met Nathan online. He was an openly pansexual guy who was also polyamorous. He’s the first polyamorous man I’ve ever dated and he was a guiding force for me when I first left my monogamous, vanilla relationship with a desire to find myself. I showed up to our first kinda-sorta date in modest clothing, nervous about the kind of deviant I’d be sitting across from; but when I sat down, those nerves melted away. I stuttered over my life story, and he confidently told me his and eventually, we meshed. He was open to leading me into my BDSM exploration. There was, however, one catch: he had to get to know me before any of his ropes touched my skin. So, we got to know each other for a good month or so before any intimacy. I remember being frustrated by this at first, but in retrospect, that was a green flag I’d come to appreciate with time.

    Cringe if you must, but Nathan was my first “Daddy”. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that when it comes to dominant men, I really only resonate with the Daddies. To me, a Daddy isn’t just some dude who really gets off on being called that, it’s not even an explicit reference to age play or age regression. It’s an acknowledgment of who in this dynamic is leading. I’d say “in power”, but I don’t think that’s necessarily the case. A Daddy leads in a nurturing way, but the power is always in my hands. Nathan helped me understand that; and when he started tying me, he led me through it all. Being a student of Devil Mask Society, he has this uncanny ability to “problem solve” by looking at my limbs and knowing exactly how to get me into the position he needs or wants me to be in. He knows how to calm me down and how to place me. When he finishes a tie and I’m stuck in his web, ready to be consumed, it’s a feeling of stillness I’m not used to feeling. One I’d struggle to find myself.  

    I met Nathan while I was living in Orange County and unfortunately when I moved to Los Angeles, it meant that we had to see each other less often. It’s been 8 years since we had that first date. What I didn’t understand as I was sitting across from him that day is what Nathan is truly unique. Nathan is a skilled, focused and practiced top-heavy switch who is, in many ways, truly pansexual. That’s a simplistic sentence, but very few people could describe themselves that way. Years before I met him, Nathan had already searched within himself to realize that he was attracted to transgender women, and he had already developed a taste for BDSM. When I met him, he was beyond the phase of his life where he was fantasizing about certain kinky tableaus, excited to experience them potentially for the first time. No, he had already done it. These were not fantasies for him, but realities that he already knew he enjoyed. His hesitation towards rushing into play with me was honestly because he saw himself, rightfully so, as too talented to give his pleasure to just anyone. I’d discover that most Doms in the LA public scene are not at all like Nathan.  

    If you ask most Doms about rope, they will tell you that it doesn’t interest them. To a lot of Dominant men, rope is laborious and silly. Some will know how to do quick and simple ties that are useful, but ultimately its very rare to find men who are passionate about rope. And the men who are passionate about rope, are usually very monosexual, usually limiting their kink to cis women. After going to the Devil Mask Society Rope social a few times, it became very obvious to me that rope I was not ever going to be a rope top’s first choice. I quickly got the sense that if I wanted to bottom for men, I had to be thin and the only women I really saw get the attention of rope tops in the city a white, asian or light skinned. The rope scene was the first space where I started to feel very self conscious about my body. Every other scene felt encouraging and inclusive, but once I got to the rope community and realized that the men in the scene don’t want to see a dark skinned, plus size trangender woman in their rope. I love my body, I love myself, but the rope scene made me wish for the first time since I was a little transgender kid that I could exist in a body other than my own. One that would perhaps be more accepted.

    When you’re fresh meat in the BDSM scene, people notice. When you’re a submissive without a Dom, people notice. I suppose being noticed is what I wanted when I first came into the scene, but the issue with being noticed is that people project onto you. One of the biggest projections I receive is that I am a Domme. Frankly, if you’re a woman who has any sense of self, any bit of confidence, any bit of gaul, you’ll be seen as dominant by people who conflate someone’s personality with their position in the slash. The projection of me as a Domme is a frustrating to me as one of the main reasons I was so afraid of BDSM is how many men have previously used it as an excuse to traumatize me. My introduction to BDSM was a man saving me in a moment of desperation and then pressuring me to dominate him for no reason other than me being black and transgender. It didn’t matter that I didn’t want to do it, because it turned him on to think of me as a domineering black shemale. As a black trans woman, I am constantly engaging with men’s fetishes which ultimately erase me and establish me in a way that I, frankly, do not and never have resonated with. I am completely averse to dominating a man. It’s a distinct line for me, so the assumption that i’m a Domme is a pretty painful one. However, it’s becoming clearer and clearer to me that many can only imagine a black transgender woman in this way.

    It seems like many people in the public scene in LA cannot imagine someone existing in my body and also being submissive. I’ll never forget having a conversation with Victor about this when we visited Sanctuary in Portland, Oregon. He pointed over at a woman who “looked submissive”. She was a thin white woman hunching her shoulders in a way that, to me, read “victim”. In that moment, it was hard for me not to think about shrinking myself in the same way I once did when I lived a more socially conservative life in the OC. I’ve worked too hard on my confidence to be like that woman. Aside from that, if I carried myself that way, society would eat me up. Unlike cis white women, I do not live in a society that entertains the premise of my vulnerability. I am not seen as deserving of protection. My mother once said to me that if I carried myself like a wounded mouse, the hawks will attack you. So I try my best to hold myself confidently, if only to protect myself. Perhaps its a shield, but it’s one that’s served me well. To me, BDSM resonates when I give that shield to knight capable of protecting me instead. I don’t want to hold a sword. I’m forced to if I want to live. I will not be eaten alive.  

    I was particularly interested in a Dominant who did seem to easily see by submissive nature. I saw him give an elaborate fire presentation at Dom Con, and it was very very hot; pun intended. While I had been familiar with this particular Dom, I hadn’t actually seen him play. At the time, I’d seen him in passing several times at various events. We’d exchange glances and flirtatious pleasantries and eventually we connected on Facebook. He asked me out to breakfast several times, but we just kept missing each other and at the time I was bottoming for someone who many people weren’t particularly fond of. We had very little conversation in person, but one night we happened to be at the same private party and we started discussing our kink interests. When I started telling him how much I enjoyed rope, he commented  

    “That must take a lot of rope…” 

    It was a comment that sat with me as it was a joke about my size that hit a very sensitive spot for me. With some of the rope tops I’ve spoken to, I’ve been very blatantly told that I was too big for their rope. I’ve had people explain to me that they don’t know how to tie someone like me, and that’s why they tend to only tie very thin women. My size is indeed what disqualifies me, and if I’m being honest, that was a hugely painful thing for me to hear, knowing what I know. But in the moment, I giggled and smiled because I was still interested in him.  

    After seeing each other at that event, he’d pursue me more and ask me about meeting him for breakfast again. I was excited by the idea, but then had to remind myself that there are some Doms who have hangups about me being transgender. As a “passing” trans woman who was stealth for a decent amount of time, I don’t really naturally out myself and sometimes in situations like this I have to remind myself that it isn’t obvious to the people who may desire intimacy with me. That’s part of why I struggle receiving compliments, I always know they’re meant for meant for the cis version of me, not the trans version of me. Despite years of unrequited glances and flirtation, his interest in me vanished once I told him I was trans. He would then clumsily share a story about someone in his kink family coming out as trans and that being a big deal as a way of ending the conversation. I have this experience a lot.  

    I was introduced to BDSM in a way that gave me a lot of optimism about being able to find open minded, trans inclusive men who wanted to dominate me because that was my experience with Nathan. With Nathan, my transness was a complete non-issue, but it seems that at least within the public scene, it will always be a problem. It’s hard to exist in a community that brands itself as so open minded and inclusive when you know that isn’t the case. Of course passing trans women are privileged in ways non passing transgender folks arent, but passing forces you to constantly engage with the reality that you’d be able to find partners if you were cis. If I were a cis woman, I think people would still assume I was a Domme, but I would have a much easier time finding partners. Without sounding too cocky, men are indeed attracted to me. There’s not a BDSM event I’ve gone to where I haven’t been hounded by men. But the line for many of these men is drawn when I tell them that I am transgender. When I vented about my experiences in the scene on instagram once, a woman reached out to me and tried to send me in the direction of someone she assumed was inclusive. That person? The man who I wrote about in the last paragraph. What bothers me is that many of these men have rainbow flags on their clothes. They’ve gotten onto soap boxes and ranted about inclusion and diversity, and they become known by cis women and AFAB folks as inclusive to the point where they do assume that these dominant men are inclusive of transgender women, when they aren’t. When they inevitably end up being attracted to an AFAB person who hasn’t medically transitioned, they may publicly question their sexuality; they may even list themselves as bisexual or pansexual after doing that self reflection. But when it all boils down to it, most of these men are only attracted to the same narrow group of usually, but not always thin white/asian women. It doesn’t matter if those Doms are people of color (the Dom I described in the previous paragraph is black); when it comes to rope that’s what I see. Several of the most popular rope tops in LA have running jokes about them only tying with “child brides”, for a reason.

    I want to make it very very clear that I am not upset with the fact that those women seemingly have access to partners who want to play with them. No one owes me their rope. Talented rope artists have a skill that, like Nathan did to me, they have the right to withhold. Nathan wouldn’t want to tie me up unless he was attracted to me. Unless he’s learning, he’d be closed off to doing rope with someone he isn’t attracted to. I don’t feel like anyone owes me anything. What I’m trying to express, however, is that existing in the body I exist in and limiting myself to men while living within LA means that rope isn’t something I’m able to explore. It’s hard to feel that way when you’re constantly being told that this little space we carve out in the BDSM community is more accepting than the vanilla spaces we seek refuge from. Maybe it’s because I’m straight, but as a transgender woman it has been significantly easier for me to find vanilla men who are excited to dominate me than it’s ever really been for me to find BDSM partners generally, but rope partners specifically. If I opened myself up to women, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation. Plenty of women want to do BDSM with me, sadly, that just doesn’t resonate with me; and frankly, I do not like that I’ve been made to feel like the only way for me to find partners is to expand my BDSM desires into something other than what I enjoy. And it’s for that reason that I will always respect the Doms who see me as existing on the outside of their sexuality, but it is a bit frustrating to realize that even some of the Doms who do want to play with you, are afraid of other people knowing about it.  

    It’s not terribly uncommon for me to only be appealing to Dominant men who want to play with me privately. After years of going to these events, I’ve realized that for a lot of dominant men, this whole BDSM thing is really just about ego. For some of these men, it’s a performance primarily for other men. When I was bottoming for that Dom that people didn’t like, it was mostly that. He wanted the appearance of many submissive women vying for his attention and affection, but he was not very present for most of those women. I saw it first hand. The one benefit he had was that he was, at least kinda, trans inclusive, but that inclusion was superficial. Because I “passed” he could develop a little bit of passion, but not as much as he’d have for a cis woman. That difference started to bother me and it’s one of the many reasons we stopped playing. After that, I had plenty of Dominant men approach me, happy that I was finally free, but many of those Dominants didn’t want to be seen playing with me because of how it would subtract from other people they were pursuing. I think what I struggle with in the BDSM scene is the fact that my vanilla relationships are mostly with men who essentially dote over me. Men who are proud to be seen with me and eager to, in their own vanilla way, dominate me. But so many dominant men in the public scene have a very particular fantasy they’re trying to fulfill and I am always going to be someone who exists outside of that fantasy for most cis men raised in the west. That’s why many can only imagine me in the context of taboo.  And admittedly, I suppose I’m doing the same with trying to find a very particular kinda guy to tie me up.

    All in all, I refuse to embrace the idea that I am inherently taboo as part of my kink practice, but very few men are on Nathan’s level. When I met Nathan, he’d been out of the public scene for years and hasn’t returned in the 8 years we’ve been together. I have taken my feelings of rejection and the criticism I have of the scene and transformed it into a monthly BDSM social that I host. I hope to facilitate a space where someone like me can eventually have an easier time finding partners.  

    As of now, I’m retiring my desire to find a consistent rope top outside of Nathan. It’s been a very long time since he’s has had the time to tie me, but he’s still the best. I have friends like @MyPolyamLife who tickle that itch for me from time to time, but as of now, I’m going to stop putting myself in situations that do not satisfy me, but make me feel othered. Perhaps i’ll learn more about rope as a purely platonic fabric arts sorta thing. I’m not sure. Either way, I’m no longer afraid of rope. I miss it.  

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  • Who’s The “Demurest” of Them All

    The internet is seemingly obsessed with a new word; “Demure”. TikTok superstar, Jools Lebron’s newest viral audio invites you into her inner monologue, where she reveals the steps she takes to ensure that she always remains “demure and mindful”. The first video I saw featured her speaking about wearing a very polite beat to work.

    “You see how I come to work? Very demure, very mindful!”

    It resonated with me, and I wasn’t the only person who immediately appropriated “demure” into their lingo. Soon I was seeing everyone upload their own versions, about their own personal lives each starting with some variation of “you see how I…”. Creators across genre were all talking about “being demure”. There were nurses, military men, educators and even the Kamala Harris campaign all using this viral audio by a transgender woman. Jools Lebron is predominately known for her humorous and honest makeup reviews, and her infectious sense of humor draws her now 1.2 million followers in. It made me very happy to see her go viral and have her moment, however, there’s a bit of debate about who exactly created this viral trend.

    Trap Seleyna is also a popular transgender creator and recently she took to TikTok to argue that she was actually the original demure girl with a video she posted several years before Jools’ video took off. The video, which has since been deleted, includes Selyna describing her body as “petite and demure”. A decidedly more literal use than the very ironic way it’s being used now. However, she’d take to social media to make her argument.

    This of course encouraged a lot of debate on Tiktok, which eventually led to Selyna deactivating her account. Watching this go down, was quite frustrating as I felt that many of these creators were pulling from their own experiences, especially as trans women of color. To me, these videos externalize an internalized narrative we all have. One that is, at times serious, like Selyna, and occasionally ironic, like Jools.

    Another popular trans woman of color, Devin Halbal, who herself has several older videos saying the phrase, offered up a more moderate approach.

    I’ve always loved Halbal’s lovely attitude and how widely celebrated she is in Asia. It was an absolute joy seeing her get swarmed with love and acceptance as a trans woman of color!

    There’s an ongoing debate about how frequently things created by black and brown folks that are unique to them have been taken, twisted, erased and universalized. One could argue that’s what’s happening with this demure trend with some videos featuring the meme not at all mentioning Jools Lebron. However, watching this trend grow organically, it was interesting to see it resonate with those who are not transgender women of color .

    To me, it’s clear that these trans women of color are pulling from their own internal monologues that often include a lot of anxiety about existing in public space as a transgender woman. For the trans feminine, “demurity” may be a feeling you internalize perhaps as you’re trying to sort out your feminine gender performance. “Passing” for many trans women is important and a huge aspect of that for some transgender women is never doing too much. You don’t want to paint yourself like a drag queen, oh no, you want to paint yourself in a soft, demure and real way. For many trans women, gender euphoria is in that sweet spot between just enough, but not too much. However, beyond how transgender women may relate to the phrase, I think it pokes at a common anxiety we all have about existing in public, while navigating the expectations others may have of us, and it’s unsurprising to me that a transgender woman would be able to call this. I think transgender women of color deal with these conversations with slightly more intensity than cis people.

    One very notable difference between both Jools and Selyna is their approach to body positivity. Jools quite regularly describes herself as a “torta”, a popular slang term that refers to larger women. A lot of her content is about her embracing herself as a larger person, whereas Selyna’s original use of demure was about her being small and skinny, and tonally it also sounds like a brag. I’ve followed Selyna for quite some time and I know that she often feels as though she’s been wronged by others and frankly, she has reasons to feel that way. However, what I think all of these trans women are missing is that they are likely very loosely referencing Venus Xtravaganza.

    ““The thing that helped me make most money in the escort service is being that I’m so little, so petite. I’m so tiny. The blonde hair and the light skin, the green eyes and little features… the clients hand will be bigger than my hand while they were holding my hand or something. They like feeling like they’re with something perfect and little and not someone that’s bigger than them””

    Paris is Burning has left a lasting impression on how many transgender women across the country, and even the world communicate through shared language and culture. You got dolls (transgender women) from Paris talking like the dolls from New York, largely because of the influence of Paris is Burning and various things inspired by it such as Ryan Murphy’s Pose. I think for me, this may have been one of the first times I’ve heard a trans woman vocalize this celebration of herself as soft and delicate, especially in a way that related to her sharing intimacy with others. Frankly, I think the queer kids of today do not really understand the immense impact of Paris is Burning. It was one of the very first times I was ever exposed to ballroom culture and I’ve seen it influence a lot of today’s queer culture and lingo.

    Most of Jools Lebron’s content about being demure relates to these sort of false dichotomies we buy into about being a good, productive, healthy or impressive person. Demurity is a performance many of us intimately know is based upon the often false dichotomies we buy into or validate. One of her videos a describes ordering a salad instead of going to Wingstop after work because that’s “demure”; and some users shared that making fun of a thought we all often have, actually did encourage them to make healthier choices. What I’ve loved about “demure” is it also doubles as a way of encouraging self care, however you may personally define it. For example, wrapping a blunt after you’ve smoked one the night before can be “very demure, very” because you know when you’re in a bad mood the next day, you’re not gonna wrap a new one. Your past self taking care of your future self, that’s “demure”. Satirically, ordering a Diet Coke after an ordering a pizza is “demure”. Technically, it’s “healthier”, but not really; and yet we still make little choices like that and allow it to make us feel a bit better about others who make other choices. Satirizing that false dichotomy has clearly been a source of catharsis for some people who make this content.

    The girl with the natural beat isn’t actually more productive at work than the girl with the green smokey eye, but in a society that stigmatizes hyper-femininity and takes it as less serious, we often allow ourselves to buy into that false assumption. To me, the power of these videos is that it draws attention to the false dichotomies we buy into and encourages us to laugh at them and I think we really need that right now.

  • Patriotic Bikinis and Other Ironies

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    This time last year, I was sitting in the passenger’s seat of my partner Edward’s car, tears falling down my face, reflecting the fireworks on the freeway as we returned from a long, unexpected trip to Tucson, Arizona. My mother had just passed away and I had just finished realizing that I was actually an adult. There’s something about sitting down at funeral home, discussing payment for a coffin, flowers and her last manicure that made me feel grown. I’d also just realized that despite a childhood full of concerns that the opposite would be true, as it turns out, I was the most successful person in my family. When push came to shove, no one else could afford to bury my mother. It all fell squarely on me, and of course, the life insurance (Thanks for the foresight, Mom.). A lot has changed about me since then. Losing my mom fundamentally shifted something within me. However, at that time, I was already on the continual path of reexamining how I was living my life.


    These past few years have been interesting. I guess my 30s are finally starting to really feel like my 30s. I’m starting to feel that discordant feeling of both closeness and distance towards who I used to be. I feel like I’ve been many people in my short 33, going on 34 years of life. When I reflect on my 20s, the biggest thing that I can say about them is that I took myself too seriously in many ways and I was too eager to be serious. I got into a relationship almost immediately after graduating college. In retrospect I think I was afraid to live life on my own. A relationship just felt like maybe the thing I should be doing and it’s funny to think that when it happened, I thought I was a late bloomer at just 21. I was very isolated and Youtube became the thing I did when my boyfriend was at work. It was never supposed to become what it ultimately became, and that’s part of why that relationship ended. He never expected me to become more successful than him, even though he never really grew career-wise during our relationship. Things stagnated and as I became more successful, I started seeing more of the world. As I saw more of the world, I realized how much I was holding myself back. How much happiness I had denied myself. How hard it was to be honest with him as it felt even harder to be honest with myself. But back then, most of my job was entrenching myself in political conversation that were almost always contentious and about the things I embodied. All during a time where, frankly, I hadn’t really allowed myself to experience much of life beyond my bedroom. When I left that relationship and I moved to LA, I felt like my life had finally started to begin. I went out a lot. I developing friendships. I developed relationships. I ended relationships. I found my scene and became a fixture within it. I was becoming an extrovert, and that’s how most people who know me now would describe me.

    However, during the pandemic, I remembered that I used to be an introvert. It took me back to the person I was during school. A person who was, objectively afraid of the world outside. Who spent all day inside, playing video games and forming an alternative identity online. A habit that would eventually lead to be becoming a Youtuber. I was one of the first overtly feminist, left leaning transgender creators on the platform and I got shit on pretty immensely for it. Many of those people have moved on and rebranded, as I’ve spoken about on this blog before, but their harassment of me had in many ways put me into a position where I fixated a bit too much on not just the politics of this country, but also the politics of online content creator communities that I’ve never really particularly cared for, in all honesty. It just encouraged me to develop bad habits. Not to mention, being one of the few made me arrogantly think that if I just made a video about something, perhaps I will have created the one thing that will change everything. Maybe my video will be the one that convinces people to no longer oppress transgender people. While it’s true to some degree thatover the years, I’ve changed a lot of hearts and a lot of minds, it was never fair for me to put that weight on my own shoulders. I started feeling overwhelmed by the pressure I once put on myself during the pandemic and I started questioning how sustainable it was for me. So i started asking myself a very different question after years and years of making content that I felt was forcing me to be hyper-fixated on things that made me miserable:

    “What would your blog look like if you started to have a bit more fun”.

    And so with that in mind, I’ve given myself the permission to be more emotive, more expressive and more creative. In truth, I’m in a phase of my creator journey where I am, for the first time, attempting to create content that, to me feels more like stereotypical, classic social media influencer type content. I’ve started focusing on instagram and Tiktok more and I’ve enjoyed the challenge of short, eye catching or mind boggling video. It’s been fun to try new things while also honing in a bit more on what exactly I’m doing. I’ve had some hurtles, but I actually have never felt more confident as a content creator. I now have a bit of a system and I’ve started to really enjoy writing a lot more. It was while I was sitting on my patio writing that I would get a call from my father saying that my mother had passed away.

    “Mumma’s Dead”

    He said to me through tears. And I knew how much he hurt in that moment. My father is not a perfect man, but one thing I have never doubted about him is how much he loved my mother. I think I learned what love looked like by seeing my father love my mother. Through her illness, he was always there. He didn’t leave her side just because she got sick. They’ve been together for most of their lives. When she passed, he began to deteriorate. I’ll never forget sitting out on my patio, receiving that phone call and screaming so loud that my neighbors popped their heads out to see if I was ok. I don’t think I’ll ever get over not being able to say good bye to her or not calling her as much as I should have. She passed away a few days before the 4th of July and honestly I was very worried I wouldn’t be able to enjoy the 4th of July this year for that reason.

    As an extension of trying to live a more creative life, I’ve decided to give myself permission to buy little costumes and such for my social media content and more. There’s a lingerie shop on Hollywood Blvd I go to sometimes called Lady Love. Avi apparently “makes” all of the bikinis in the store. They’re overpriced, but I guess there’s still something kinda novel to me about going into a lingerie shop and buying a bikini. One of my last delusional purchases from him was an American flag bikini. I actually saw one in a different store, but I like Avi. He’s a sweetheart and he tries his best to find something for his girls. He always makes a point of saying to me:

    “I make for Latoya!”

    as he pulls up an old dusty photo of a stage piece he made for Latoya Jackson many years ago.

    Like a lot of my shopping on Hollywood Blvd, I go for one thing, end up buying a bunch of other things. He has so many different colors and patterns of bikinis and to me, each one is a different photoshoot or costume base. I like the adjustable ones cuz I’m a thicker girl. Plus, I like the look. Avi has one of the few shops on the boulevard that actually carries plus sizes as well. While I was thumbing through bikinis, a thicker trans girl came into the store. She was also looking for something cute for pictures. I started talking to her about the stuff in the shop and then she told Avi

    “She’s good, you should give her a job”.

    I laughed. It sounds strange, but I’ve never really had a service job before. Youtube is really the only job I know. Well, aside from sex work. I was a cam girl for a very short period of time and through my life, I’ve done a lot of things for survival that were essentially sex work, but weren’t technically. Sometimes I know the girls I run into on the boulevard are working. That same day, actually, after grabbing two bikinis I looked at closely, and one American flag bikini I assumed fit me, I ran into a girl on the street. She actually stopped me because she recognized me. She was absolutely beautiful. Gorgeous skin, the most perfectly curated brows, a really cute little outfit. I couldn’t spook. I wouldn’t have even thought. But she told me she was a doll and that she was selling pussy on the boulevard. I didn’t even know that happened anymore out there… it was the middle of the day too. I was gagged for many reasons. Sometimes when I see younger transgender people, it’s interesting to me because they’re often so much better looking than any of the girls of my era were at that age, but they’re still struggling through their own complex battle with transphobia and how it impacts their ability to survive. As I stood there with my bag full of overpriced bikinis, I realized how fortunate I was to be purchasing them for “work” that I consider to be more rewarding than sex work ever was.

    Naturally, the bikini didn’t fit. I wasn’t adjustable and I was going purely off vibes. I’ve never had a problem with any of the bikinis I’ve purchased from him. Guess that’s what I get for not looking closely at everything. I took it back and Avi was happy to exchange it, but I couldn’t find one that was exactly like the one I already got. I liked the stars one on boobs and the bars on another with the stars as bottoms. Felt more iconic than other patterns. He worked with me for a while trying to turn what wasn’t a fully adjustable bikini into one by cutting up elastic adding new chord, but ultimately after about 10 minutes of trying to sort it out, I decided not to exchange it. I can just fix it with the new chord he gave me. All this fuss made me more committed to wear this damn bikini. I’m not remotely patriotic, but there was something about the process of me getting the idea to get the bikini, then buying it, then fussing over it that made me think to myself “I’m gonna wear this for the forth of July and I’m gonna have fun!”. It’s like the tackiness of an American flag bikini gave me the permission to deliberately have fun, as opposed to accidentally. So I made it my goal to make this year’s forth of july celebration better more memorable than last year’s.

    When I think of the 4th of July, I think of my father taking out a bunch of folding chairs and sitting them on our front lawn so we can watch the fireworks from the local High School. We never did much, just sat as a family and watched fireworks. How boring. I guess I’ve always wanted to do more so a few years ago, I decided to go to somewhere patriotic for the occasion: Texas. I know this may surprise some of you, but I’ve always been the kinda person who prefers the local vibe, even if that local vibe is kinda redneck. I don’t like limiting myself to liberal areas and I think the fact that I started drinking and going out in Orange County probably has a lot to do with that. I’ve never had an unpleasant time in a more conservative town, but there’s always time for a first. At that point, I could never say I traveled to Texas on purpose for a reason that wasn’t work, so I thought I’d give it a go. However, when I landed in Austin and immediately realized that I could have stood to do more planning. Maybe I shouldn’t entirely follow my bliss and should actually do some googling as well. I wanted to ride a few cowboys and what I got instead were Silverlake hipsters. Daggumit! I do mean that literally too; Austin is just LA 2.0. But I went to the nude lake and that was pretty fun so it is what it is! Interestingly enough though, I missed the fireworks. But I had fun nonetheless.

    This year, my partner Alexander invited Edward and I to his BBQ. Of my partners, Alexander is the most classic white boy of them all. He loves finding a loose excuse to do a BBQ. Im sure I could convince him to do one for Juneteenth if I really wanted to. He works at a pretty straight-laced company, but some of his coworkers are regular fixtures at his BBQs. Sometimes that cracks me up. Alexander is married and his wife has a boyfriend who lives with them. And then there’s me, his black transgender girlfriend whom he has never attempted to pretend doesn’t exist. So I guess you gotta be very cool with all of that to get the invite even though none of these subjects ever come up in conversation. Alexander recently purchased a home and ever since we’ve been dating, we’ve talked about him getting a jacuzzi and of course he finally did. When I got that bikini, I knew I’d be wearing it in his jacuzzi. I think of my partners, he’s the one I enjoy being sexy for the most. Obviously, my partners are all very attracted to me, but he has such boyish glee when I wear something cheeky around him. He’s my most vanilla and straight laced partner so I guess it kinda makes sense, but playing off of that makes me happy because he makes me very happy. So I knew that I wanted to be in his jacuzzi for the 4th.

    You’ll notice I’ve not mentioned anything about my appreciation for America’s independence. Frankly, I can’t think of a time I’ve been less patriotic in my life. Did you see the debate? I certainly didn’t. But that’s just a continuation of my pandemic-inspired trend of disengaging from politics. When Trump was elected the first time, it shattered a lot of the remaining liberal sentiment within me. It became more clear to me how little power I have to really move the needle in any way. During that time, I uploaded a video essay called The Rebranding of White Nationalism. I made it with a desire to draw attention to the fact that fascism may indeed remerge in a particularly racialized way. And it wasn’t like I was pulling that out of my ass. Many people who are close to Trump have very publicly traded in white supremacist conspiracy theories like the great replacement and that’s only gotten worse since. Back then, I got a lot of attacks from people who essentially said that I was pulling it out of my ass. Trying desperately to find racism where there was none. Many people spoke to me as though I had never done any research about the subject, when in reality, the research about the subject honestly low-key traumatized me. Living in conservative areas for most of my life has made me more willing to consider that perhaps a conservative is making a valid point or has a reason to feel how they feel. But the problem is, the people whose goal it is to instill a type of white/christian nationalism in this country have played the long con. They have worked for a very long time to gain the power they’ve been gaining and liberals have largely allowed them to do so. I can’t be proud to be an American when my options for president are the person who said it would be one of their top priorities to make my life harder as a trans woman and a man who shamelessly sides with Zionism. Neither of these men speak to me. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still gonna vote in every single election, but I’m certainly not going to brag about my vote and I’ve never been able to.

    Youtube forcibly privated that video essay because it discussed the Christchurch shooting. I was going to rework the video, and then I decided against it. While a lot of people told me I was crazy back then, and many even said I was being outlandish for accusing certain conservative figures for being in bed with white nationalist interests, things have gotten much more blatant. There is no question now that many of the things I said in that video were indeed correct, and that much of what we are seeing happen now is the result of repackaging very racist ideas in plausibly deniably ways. I think having so many people attack me for saying that back then kinda impacted me and made me realize how impossible it is to communicate these things to people who are honestly so undereducated that they truly believe you’re speaking in conspiracies. And the more you look into that, the more you realize that is by design. Educating against that is an uphill battle, and frankly, there are much better educators out there now who can make that content more effective than I’d ever been able to.

    A few years ago, I had a thought. Let’s say that they get what they want. Let’s say that transgender people are all rounded up and permanently separated from public life. Let’s say that in a few years, my freedoms will be severely limited in a way they aren’t right now. When I look back at this time in my life, I don’t want to think of the hours I spent on Twitter defending myself. I don’t want to think of the long political video essays I worked on to no effect. I don’t want to think of all of the exhausting political conversations I had that went nowhere, but would become anecdotes in a conservative’s story about engaging with an undesirable. I want to enjoy my life. I want to enjoy my remaining days of freedom if that freedom is indeed going to be taken from me.

    My doctor has me on injectable hormones and I’m supposed to be getting a new vial every month, but I realized that I didn’t really need to do that. I can just keep using the same vial and as long as I purchase syringes and needles, I can take one vial and use it for several months. Even though it feels impossible right now, it’s very possible that this time next year, I will lose complete access to my hormones. So even though I don’t want to and even though it’s expensive, I am going to keep filling my prescription every month so that I can have backup if I need it. Right now, i’m thinking a lot about how important it will become to create a local network for mutual support and aid. I host a large monthly gathering largely for this reason. Disconnecting from social media has made me more aware of the people around me and how technology has created a superficial boundary that has allowed me, as a person of a certain class to distance myself from the layer of our society that has no access to the net at all. If the internet is gone, our communities and the networks we build within our communities will become more important. There have been times in my life that I’ve gone years without introducing myself to my neighbors. That’s changed. Withdrawing a bit has allowed me to have other energy for other things. I feel guilty about it in a way, but I’ve been enjoying my life much more. If I’m wrong, the worst I’ve been is fiercely defensive of my mental health. If I’m right, I’ll at least have a backlog of positive memories. Part of why I’m writing this post is because I wanted to be able to look back at this 4th of July as one of those moments.

    Selfie from Edward’s closet

    Edward and I got to Alexander’s BBQ pretty late. I had a date earlier in the week and I thought I’d left my purse at the restaurant, but it turns out it was just buried under a bunch of stuff on my couch. I spent a really long time looking for it and didn’t leave my place until the BBQ had already started. Very typical for Kathryn. I’m fairly convinced I have ADHD. When we got there, Alexander was of course wearing his cute BBQ bib, playing his role as man of the house, king of the grill. He made this really delicious brisket and pork. I’m remembering that we still have a bit of it in the fridge (I’ll get to that before Edward does today.). Alexander’s wife decided that we would start a new tradition! Piñatas for the 4th!


    I hadn’t hit one in so long and these were pretty tough to crack. I had completely forgotten that this used to be one of my favorite things to do as a kid. I loved having any socially acceptable excuse to hit something. We made a makeshift string out of zip ties and then we each took turns hitting it. I actually ended up busting open one that had a bunch of savory snacks inside. Another had these little cheap liquor bottles in it. I was judged by everyone for collecting the little fireball shooters. Those remind me of making bad decisions in my teens.

    • Alexander
    • Edward

    When the party was almost over and most people had left, Edward and Alexander and I all go into the jacuzzi and I finally reached my goal of sitting in my boyfriends jacuzzi with my other boyfriend wearing that bikini I got from Lady Love. Predictably, both Alexander and Edward are engineers and one of the things I love about dating an engineer is randomly asking them how things work. I hadn’t thought of how fireworks were made so I asked them and they both explained it to me. Apparently certain metals, when mixed with gunpowder will put off specific colors when they explode. How cool is that? I know that every time I look up at fireworks, along with thinking about my mom, I’ll always think of this moment where two men I love are sharing this intentional space with me. Celebrating.. I guess BBQ and fireworks with me. I loved watching fireworks from the Jacuzzi. Edward and I just reached our 4th year together and Alexander and I have been together for just over 5. I love them both a lot and I know they both love me a lot and I’m so thankful for them and their ability to share this particular time with me. I’m not sure what I’d do without them honestly. Edward is great at keeping me on track and keeping me realistic while also reminding me not to take myself too seriously. And Alexander is great at making me always feel protected, valued and nurtured. Yeah, i’d feel how I feel about myself without them, but at the same time, it’s much easier with them here. Historically, my obsession with political discussions online has made it harder for me to truly appreciate my partners. My ex would tell you that was maybe a big issue in our relationship. I feel that my appreciation for my partners has greatly expanded as I’ve withdrawn from political discussion on social media. I certainly don’t regret that.

    On our way home, Edward and I got stopped in a street closure. Youngsters mobbed a major intersection near UCS and set off fireworks and drove their cars recklessly.



    I could feel the younger, more conservative version of me being annoyed by this, but the newer me wanted to join them. I saw, in a very small way, how a group of very dedicated people can stop traffic, cause a scene, regroup and then disperse…all for a little bit of fun. To me, it’s very clear that the direction this country is headed in is one that will indeed inspire some type of uprising. Conservatives know that their beliefs are not popular and they know they do not speak for the majority. That’s why their tactics are such a long con. Look into project 2025. It is not, and has never been, something that could have been solved through this election. Much of it happened under Biden. Conservatives eagerly defund education so that voters aren’t informed enough to know better and vote accordingly. I don’t think they stopped traffic because they just loved America so much that they felt compelled to disturb the peace. In fact, I’d argue that was actually a direct response to fireworks being banned in the city. I suppose seeing this little moment of disruption gave me a bit of hope that we won’t take it all laying down if it ever gets there. In a strange way that gave me hope.

    I wonder if I’ll be able to do this all again next year…

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  • Places and Spaces to Avoid in the LA Kink Scene

    If you read my last entry, you’ll know that I am not unfamiliar with abusive spaces and places within the LA BDSM/Sex positive community. Previously, I would warn people in an indirect way on Fetlife; but as we speak, Fetlife has decided to ban me, once again, for speaking out against the woman who sexually assaulted me. A friend of mine who was also assaulted by the same organizer was told to “bury it”. Bury it so to avoid “drama”. Far too many people have silenced victims in this scene in order to keep these spaces around. If I could trust how our community self policed, I would not feel the need to make a post like this. The truth is, many kinksters are pushed out of communities when they speak out about the abuses they’ve experienced within them. I’ve been greatly harmed at “newbies” events or events that have listed themselves as inclusive, but are not. When people like me are silenced, we struggle to communicate to new people that certain spaces and places are not safe and the cycle continues.

    The more I sit with this, the more upset I’ve become that we cannot inform each other and those who’ve harmed others are allowed to get away with their abuses time and time again. Upon reflection, I realized that I have the ability to use my website to warn new players and old of spaces and places to avoid. These are generally conversations I’d have in person, not online, but to quell my desire to share this information on websites that have disallowed it, I figured I’d make a master list here, for people to share to keep each other informed.

    The spaces and places mentioned are events or spaces with a fairly well documented pattern of bad behavior. Some places are worse than others. For that reason, I’ve decided to sort these spaces and places into two categories. Red light spaces have privileged and empowered abusive and predatory people who have repeatedly harmed others. Yellow Light spaces have questionable histories, with management that have made me personally disinterested in them; but they are not spaces I’d say are completely bad with no redeeming qualities. Keep in mind, I tend to have a risk-aware approach to most things and I don’t mind spaces that are rough around the edges. However, I want folks to be informed so that they can walk into the space with an understanding of what they’re walking into.

    I will always believe that anyone has the capacity to change and perhaps these spaces listed will not always be bad forever. But as of now, I would greatly caution against them. Feel free to take what I’m saying as a warning, not gospel.

    I will continue to edit this list as things pop up. This is my list as of June 13th 2024.

    Red Light

    Dark Magic Society

    As detailed in my previous post, Dark Magic Society is organized by a woman whose scene name is Robin LaRoux. She personally sexually assaulted me years ago at the home of a mutual friend. That’s honestly enough for me to tell you this wouldn’t be the best place to go, but my primary concern is their false presentation as an inclusive group.

    DMS has a very long history in the scene and you may initially be drawn to them because Robin makes a point of interviewing every member and making sure they’re a right fit for the group. However, the core of the group is a very heterosexist swinging structure. Their website boasts an “even ratio of men and women, and transgenders”. This is to ensure their heterosexual male customers that the event is not a “sausage fest”. There will always be more men than women interested in these spaces so it’s part of the economics of the space to ensure to men that there are enough women accessible to them. DMS has a history of gendered pricing, where women get in for free and men pay top dollar to gain access to those women. This policy has changed, as their venues have changed and the owners have disagreed with gendered pricing as a concept. Events with gendered pricing are not inclusive, even if they welcome transgender people.

    A nonbinary DMAB friend of mine reached shared with me that when they asked Robin how much they’d have to pay, she responded “you’re a man unless you’re fully a woman. Full price”. Obviously suggesting that they’d have to undergo an incredibly expensive surgery in order to enter the space for free, and thus be a product for her cis hetero male customers to consume. Within these spaces there is a subtext of “If you’re a person with a penis who wants a person with a vagina, you must pay”. You can only imagine what environment that creates for women.

    A former partner of Robin’s reached out to me and described the organizer becoming incredibly cold towards her after she no longer wanted to sexually satisfy, as she phrased it, “her paying customers”. As someone who experienced something quite similar in my early days in the scene, I unfortunately identify with this a lot.

    Additionally, a few years ago, DMS hosted a villains themed party where a couple showed up in Nazi regalia. Robin, along with her co-organizer, Todd, would defend the couple, as they were long-time members, known by many in the group. They’d then falsely accuse the owner of the dungeon of physically attacking the couple after publicly defending the couple’s right to show up in Nazi regalia at the venue owned by the son of holocaust survivors. To my understanding, this was a Jewish couple and whether you think race play is excusable or not, it was explicitly against the rules of the dungeon and for that, their relationship with that dungeon ended. DMS has overstayed their welcome in every public venue they’ve had since I’ve lived in the city.

    DMS presents itself as an inclusive event geared towards newbies. In reality, they are a group run by a very drunk woman who predominately targets women of color. All of the victims who’ve reached out to me have been women of color, mostly Black, some Asian. Robin has sexually assaulted and otherwise mistreated several people within the scene. I would not suggest this event to anyone. This may sound extreme but I also get the impression that some of the people within this group have a very cult-like mentality around protecting the group. It is this cult’s mere obsession with silencing those standing up against abuses within the space or at the hands of this organizer that have inspired this post. Had they not been so passionate about silencing me, I’d probably not be writing it.

    SoCal Kink Hikers

    If you’re a person who enjoys hiking and is also kinky, you’ve probably seen some posts advertising for a group called SoCal Kinky Hikers. The group is organized by a photographer who goes by Rexitron. Rexitron also has a bit of a cult-like following and he will use women to reach out to other submissive women at his behest. I’ve received many direct invites to these events and I know that it’s because I am an s type and a woman.

    SoCal Kink Hikers is a good example of an event that is predominately organized for the organizer to find partners. What’s been described to me many times is a process of slowly but surely alienating male members of the event to funnel the women in the space into a smaller private parties. Rexitron hosts “littles” and Shibari parties where women are required to be nude. At these parties, he is typically the only man. This is not made clear in the invitation.

    Like DMS, they tend to approach newbies in the scene who may not immediately think this is strange. There are several accusations of consent violations against the organizer; who by the way, is also a Trump supporter. I would heavily advise against this group. You may instead prefer SoCal Hiking, run by an ex of his.

    Serenity Studios

    Madame Serpent runs Serenity Studios and she is also my very first experience with a manipulative “Dom”. You can read about my full experience with her in my last post, but ultimately, she threatened to blackball me from the scene because I spoke about her (without naming her) slut shaming me for sharing BDSM with more than one dominant at the very beginning of my kink journey. She has told me that newbies are her kink and when I spoke out against her a few years ago, many former newbies reached out to me to share their experiences. They range from abusive to violative and since I’ve known Pent, she’s been oriented towards centering herself and being in control. These repeated experiences tell me that she has not changed since the almost decade since we had our experience.

    There are a lot of reasons why I think she should not be running a dungeon, but her manipulation and desire to silence me for speaking about mistreatment are the biggest reasons. She still works overtime to silence those speaking out against them about the harm they’ve caused. It’s also fairly clear that she has a history of abusing and cheating on her partners, then blaming it on mental health. She often weaponizes her own mental health when she is being criticized by those she’s harmed. As I write this, she is currently suicide baiting on her platforms because of my previous post.

    Her dungeon is being run illegally, is not in her name, but her partners (for legal reasons) and is listed as a “multimedia company”. Dungeon Monitors are directed to tell cops they’re having a “wrap party” if they show up. I believe people change, I think the only thing that’s changed about her is her gender. Like Rexitron, she is also a Trump supporter (though this may have since changed. She has marched at many pro-Trump rallies).

    As of now, she’s stepped down at the dungeon, but she’s done this before and will likely return.

    Yellow Light

    Threshold

    Threshold is the very first dungeon I ever had a full BDSM scene at. I have enjoyed many of the events within the space and at their core, I believe the people within Threshold mean well and try their best. Unfortunately, sometimes that isn’t enough and there are some things I would keep in mind before visiting this dungeon.

    Of the spaces in LA, Threshold has, I’d say, the most volunteers. It’s entirely volunteer run and they do try their best to do things democratically. However, they have a very shoddy understanding of “restorative justice” and how it’s utilized. More often than not, people simply want dangerous people to no longer have access to the dungeon, but for legal reasons, they never quite remove people who’ve harmed others from the dungeon. Restorative Justice is about addressing both the needs of the victim and the needs of the accused. It requires an immense community effort and neutrality that Threshold doesn’t have. To properly utilize Restorative Justice, they would need resources they simply do not have. There is a “board” with a process that feels all very serious and official, but in truth, does not function in the capacity our community imagines. I have removed people for sexual assault and non consensual acts of violence who have found positions of power at Threshold.

    I can’t say that Threshold is a bad place to go or entirely unsafe. Frankly, I’d judge Threshold based on the particular party happening and the particular crew organizing it. Different parties have different vibes and different crews. Of the current spaces in LA, Threshold is the largest with the most space to play. It’s a labor of love and I think that’s worth considering. In a way, I am a bit forgiving of the space because I recognize that.

    Sometimes the poor decisions made by the board are a matter of certain people not having the information they need to make the right decisions. However, I would say Threshold has been a mess since I’ve lived in the city. But frankly, every dungeon in LA has something wrong with it or has some history of bad decisions and unsafe players. The issue with Threshold is, frankly, it’s a bit up it’s own ass and will perform a lot of ceremony to essentially continue empowering people who aren’t very safe.

    As of now, many people are striking against Threshold for their decision to temporarily reinstate a person accused of consent violations to their board. That person has since been removed, but for some that stain remains. Proceeded with caution. Familiarize yourself with the organizers of the events and their attendees before attending. Go with friends.

    Club Labyrinth

    I started going to Club Labyrinth right around the time it opened. The venue was a work in progress and I appreciated that, unlike most swingers spaces in Los Angeles, it was inclusive. Memberships were still gender based, but they always allow anyone who’d like to come to come. In that way, it sets itself apart from other spaces.

    When I first started going, I recognized the door guy as a long-time DM at Sanctuary Studios; another dungeon in Los Angeles. Someone who I certainly see as an ethical, thoughtful person who stands for what is right. As I became a regular, I became close to the bartender, who now runs her own fetish performance nights in the city. Both of them, along with other staff stopped working at Club Labyrinth once they found the owner installing hidden cameras around the premises. Club Labyrinth’s claim is these cameras were for security, but I was told the cameras were actually pointed at play areas and were deliberately hidden. To my understanding, the owner monitors the club remotely and controls every there, down to the music that plays hour by hour.

    Because of the conflicting stories, I’m not sure if I can say that Club Labyrinth is necessarily unsafe. I understand the need for cameras for security but it’s pretty atypical for cameras to be pointed at play areas. When I used to go, I would run into people who I know would very much not appreciate being recorded. Because I can’t say for sure, I’d proceed with caution. I’m more inclined to believe these cameras are unethically placed, as that is why the people I personally know who have worked there decided to leave. I trust their judgement.

    Drachaus

    Drachaus is an underground club that hosts a lot of very interesting events. I’ve been to several great events there over the years and they vary from immersive theater, kink performances, goth bands and swingers events. Drachaus is also one of the former venues for Dark Magic Society. The owner Fhedesh is an eccentric music producer and I can tell he has real genuine passion for creating a space for the strange and creative in Los Angeles. I do admire that. I’ve spent many late nights at Drachaus and at a certain point, I would say it was one of my favorite spaces. Rough around the edges, but I like it like that. I love the vibe of people putting something together intentionally and using what they have.

    That all being said, a few years ago the venue decided to hire a DJ who sexually assaulted a woman within the Goth scene. Being part of several groups that mobilize against predatory people within the scene, I heard directly from the victim about what happened to her and that is when I, along with others in the community, decided to mobilize and stand against this DJ. Our desire was to inform Fedesh internally about the DJ so that he could make the right decision and not give this person space to potentially abuse how he had in the past. Mind you, in this particular case, it was not a rumor or a false accusation. While its true that false accusations happen and sometimes DJs will sling them at each other so that they can get more gigs; in this case the DJ paid the medical fees of the victim and had publicly acknowledged what he’d done. I believe at the time, there were also other conversations of safety at Drachaus and Fedesh decided to share this post, written by a friend of his while we were all rallying for her.

    Fhedesh did not write this post, but he did repost it and write the last sentence himself.

    When I look at this entire situation, I can understand that at the time Fhedesh felt frustrated and he was trying to collect information so that he could make a decision based on facts and not rumors. This post came from a place of frustration and I know that’s why it was made. Ultimately, the victim sat down with him and spoke directly to him and the correct decision was ultimately made. The DJ was fired, but many have not forgotten this post and its very clear advertisement that women have no reason to expect safety within the venue. I’m a risk aware person so I understand the heart of what this post is saying, but it was indeed the wrong thing to say while people are speaking out about the fear of sexual assault by a man he’s hired. Posting this was poor judgement.

    Like I said, I’ve been many times and I know that the space does not have the proper safety precautions a dungeon would, but it still has kink furniture and is a sex-possible space. This after hours spot is like many: full of substances and potentially questionable people. I don’t necessarily think that’s all bad. I can’t say that I ever personally felt unsafe, but I’m sure trauma has shifted my barometer when it comes to that. However, there’s a difference between going into a space like that with a risk aware perspective and being told it’s irrational to expect safety.

    So all in all, I would say definitely walk into this space with an awareness of these things. I’d come with friends. Like Threshold, there are different events that happen within this space and some are better than others.

    In conclusion

    These are just the spaces and places I’m personally aware of. I think it’s important to note that I function predominantly within pansexual (read: heterosexual) spaces and so I’m sure there’s an entire other community of queer events that aren’t really on my radar. I don’t know everything, just a lot.

    If you have a story to share, please share it in the comments. Even if it’s a space outside of LA.

    Like I said, I will be using this as a master post that I will update as time goes on. We have to keep each other safe.

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  • Serenity Studios + Dark Magic Society: Nazis, Manipulation, Kids and The Handsy Drunk Who Calls The Shots

    It’s been a very long time since I’ve written about the BDSM community. Many years ago, when I moved to Los Angeles and began my journey of pursuing a more empowered sex positive life, most of that journey centered around entering the BDSM community. As a person who experienced a lot of exploitation, sexual violence, and bigotry, navigating this community was incredibly daunting to me at first and if you’ve paid attention to my journey, you will remember some of the stories I’ve told that will be repeated here. I used to feel like these conversations were things I would keep in the dark forever, but naturally, as kink became a huge part of social life and network, it became a subject I blogged about. When I came into the BDSM scene, there were several people who took advantage of my ignorance and all of the positive things I can say about BDSM, are unfortunately sabotaged by the reality of the offline community around BDSM.

    Typically, when I’ve written about the scene, I have gone the extra mile to conceal names and identifying info. When it comes to this particular issue, the reason I am not going to do that is because the people I’m going to name have worked incredibly hard to silence me. They’ve effectively rallied people at Fetlife to remove each post I’ve made trying to draw attention to these issues. For that reason, I am going to plainly name the people involved in this issue and I will do so with absolutely no regret, nor shame. They could have chosen to let my posts remain internal, but instead they want to make it so that the information is impossible to find. I will not be silenced.

    Serenity Studios

    When I came into the BDSM community, I was getting out of a 6 year, very vanilla, very heteronormative relationship. Before then, I had participated for years in the swing community. The week I turned 18, I went to a swinger club with a much much older Dom. It was very maladjusted, but part of why it was interesting to me was I desired a connection to a community that was more sex positive than the one I was raised in. I met people who I thought were my friends and it would take me too long to process that they were, in one way or another, taking advantage of me. At that phase of my life, I did not really have a sense of who I was and a lot of people took advantage of me being in a hypersexual state post grooming and abuse. I don’t really blame anyone for this, but long story short, I was traumatized and that’s why I tried real hard to pretend I was vanilla. I was not; that along with other things is ultimately why I ended my relationship and became primarily focused on connecting with the BDSM community.

    I was living in Orange County at the time and back then, there was a little dungeon called Dragonsgate. Dragonsgate was my very first BDSM dungeon and it was the way I connected with some people who are still within my kink circle. At Dragongate, I would meet the first person who’d ever give me bottom space. At the time, they went by the moniker Sir Pent. Pent was, at the time, your prototypical dominant who, especially to a newbie, seemed like one of the better people to play with. Pent and I had exchanged passing flirtation, but I was very hesitant to play with people when I first came into the scene. My early days in the BDSM dungeon were mostly me crossing my arms behind my back and watching other people play. But Pent made me incredibly curious. We had passing flirtation and it wouldn’t eventually become play until they were working an event at a dungeon called Sanctuary Studios called Awakening. Pent was working paddles on the night I visited Awakening for the first time. Awakening is essentially a BDSM taste testing event. It still happens today and I think it’s a really great event for newbies. However, one of Pent’s main fetishes, as I would later learn was newbies. When they gave me a taste of their paddles, they gave me a bit more than they gave other people. I didn’t know it at the time, but they managed to get me into “bottomspace”. If you’ve never done BDSM, bottomspace is hard to describe. It’s almost like that feeling you get after an intense work out. Where you feel good, accomplished and like you overcame something that was challenging, but enjoyable. For a lot of bottoms, it puts them in a very loopy and suggestible headspace. I didn’t really understand that ths was what I was experiencing, as a newbie. I wandered around the club like a lost puppy and naturally other dominants found me, were interested in playing with me so I agreed and did so. What I didn’t understand about Pent at the time, was he was a bit possessive. After our scene, he privately contacted me on Fetlife while we were still at the event and privately, sneakily slipped me his phone number. Using Pent’s phone number, I shared what happened with them the next day. They were so turned off that I had bottomed for other people that they said to me “It seems like you get around”; essentially slut shaming me after my first few experiences bottoming for someone. It took me a lot to get to the point where I went to a dungeon and let someone spank me, but here I was immediately feeling all the guilt and shame I was trying to get away from. Being a newbie, this was very confusing. Pent was the kind of Dom who wanted to be the only man in the lives of their submissives. They had many submissives who all only bottomed for them and that was the dynamic they were in at the time. They were interested in me and we had many conversations about how if I bottomed for them, I couldn’t bottom for other people. Keep in mind, I was new and this was being presented to me as the gold standard. But I wasn’t their submissive. I wasn’t their bottom. I was just some girl they liked that they spanked at a newbies event. Still, because they pursued me and what I didn’t know at the time was this was a violation of an agreement they had made with their primary partner at the time. They were trying to cheat on them with me. That’s why Pent was so secretive about giving me their number. 

    After Pent said what they said to me, I asked around about whether or not it was normal, and I found out pretty quickly that it wasn’t. I’ve always kept a journal on Fetlife about my kink journey and I wrote something very indirectly describing them and what happened. No real names, just nicknames and loose inferences. This post would apparently really piss off Pent and his partner at the time, who would cal my phone several times begging for me to remove the post. When I finally did get them on the phone, they threatened to blackball me entirely from the community if I did not remove the post. Pent said to me that Mistress Cyan, owner of Sanctuary Studios, would ban me from every upcoming event unless I removed the post. This was complete bullshit, but I was new and I figured this more experienced person with power quite genuinely had the ability to blackball me entirely from the scene because I wrote about them slut shaming me vaguely on my page. So I eventually did remove the post. That was my first time being silenced about abuse in the scene.

    The longer I was in the scene, the more I realized how much Pent relied on my ignorance in order to manipulate me. This was a person who immediately wanted to define BDSM for me. They immediately gave me a false impression of what was “real” BDSM was and they were incredibly deceptive in their pursuit of me. This was my FIRST experience in the BDSM scene. The first person to ever give me bottom space, who didn’t follow up with aftercare, shamed me for bottoming for other people. I learned very quickly in this scenario that people in power at dungeons are willing to use their power to silence people. 

    Pent would go on to open up their own extension of Sanctuary studios that got shut down because they were listing it as a photography studio when it wasn’t. Eventually, with more organization and resources, they opened up their own dungeon in Riverside called Serenity Studios. It’s been many years since I had my experience with them and while I’m inclined to believe that people change and on the scale of bad, I suppose my experience could have been worse, unfortunately it seems like some of that behavior hasn’t changed. There’s alittle over a dozen of us in the scene who can say they’ve been mistreated by Pent. And knowing what I know, it’s impossible for me not to imagine an abuse of power.Mistress Cyan is certainly not the sort of person who’d ban me from the space because of a post I made online. That was purely Pent attempting to use his proximity to an authority figure to scare me into silence. It was deliberately manipulative. I can very easily imagine them wielding power in an abusive way at Serenity. So when the dungeon opened, I spoke out about my experience. Which is how I connected with their other victims. My experience is like a mild annoyance compared to theirs. What bothers me about all of this is it sharply contrasts with my initial image of the BDSM community. 

    When I first came into this scene, I did so with the assumption that it was safe. That’s what people told me. That it was a place where rules were standardized and people would try their best to make sure that everything and everyone is safe. As a newbie, it’s so easy to give a lot of legitimacy to dungeons simply because they are dungeons. However, the longer you’re around the more you realize that many of the people in these dungeons are unsafe. You realize that ego and tribalism often override the desire to maintain a safe space for kink. People are less likely to believe that their friends could potentially violate someone’s consent. You start to notice the very selective way in which consent violations are addressed. Pent was a DM at sanctuary  for years. I wasn’t the only person they hurt. There were a lot of people who were negatively impacted by them. In our own negotiations before the shit hit the fan, they essentially communicated to me that if I were a real submissive, I would let them do whatever he wanted to do to me even if it violated my gender dysphoria or made me uncomfortable. That really messed with my head and his way of introducing me to BDSM really negatively impacted my views. Some people organize in the BDSM community purely so they can standardize a type of abuse that flatters them. 

    Since having my experience with Pent, a lot of things have changed. I don’t speak about this very much for reasons I’ll get into, but within the Los Angeles BDSM scene, I’ve become a somewhat prolific munch organizer. I organize a group called LA Kinky Weirdos and host a munch every month in silverlake towards the end of the month. We’ve thrown several play parties that were all entirely for charity. Together with the support of 910 Weho, a dungeon in West Hollywood, we’ve raised over 10k for the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center. Each of our events featured queer vendors and performers. I made absolutely no money and that’s the only context where i feel comfortable organizing something. In my observation, the biggest enemy of safety in the BDSM scene is money. Money makes it so that we have to open up our spaces to people who aren’t safe and it means we have to placate the status quo. Money plus ego is even worse. So many people organize events to get laid or to flatter themselves. There are probably people reading this right now who are familiar with LA Kinky Weirdos but had no idea I was the person behind it. That is by design. It’s not about me, nor is it about my friends. LA Kinky Weirdos is my attempt at doing SOMETHING to build a community and network of kinksters. I want people to meet and connect with enough people who can tell them that the shit Pent tried to do to me isn’t ok. I wanted people to have a more pleasant introduction to BDSM. I already feel kinda alienated within the scene as a black trans woman so I especially don’t organize my events around finding partners none of it’s about that.

    For all the reasons above, I have discovered that in comparison to other groups, I tend to be a lot more severe when it comes to how I handle bad players. I’m sure I’m not 100% correct about this, but my attitude is if I find out you’re a consent violator, I just remove you entirely. I ban you from my space and the events we host. That said, my standard for that is kinda high. If I ban someone for consent violations, we typically really want to know what it’s about. We also want to know that it’s actually true. So we try to conduct an investigation internally before we decide to ban someone. As we are not a dungeon and at this point only organize a munch, I feel we get away with this a bit more. I understand why other spaces aren’t as harsh, but I know the women and queer people within my group appreciate when I ask a person who’s been dangerous to leave and never return.

    Unfortunately, when you spend so much time fielding accusations, you start to recognize a pattern within some of them. It’s not uncommon for accusations to only come up after a break up, for example. Sometimes two people have very different approaches to BDSM and they rush into play prematurely and hurt each other. Other times i’ve discovered that people will trigger each other and then one person will be transformed into a predator purely for that reason. I never want to invalidate someone’s experience, but before removing someone, I want to know that they are truly dangerous. That they’re the type of person who should not have access to these spaces where they can hurt more people. So if I remove someone, it’s usually for that reason. However, some of those people I’ve removed have not only found comfort in other spaces, but also power and influence. For example, I removed a former DM of mine for violating someone’s consent and they were still able to work as a DM for Threshold. The pictures I received of the victim were incredibly concerning. I couldn’t believe he’d hurt someone that much without their consent. Because this person went through a “restorative justice” session, with Threshold, they were reinstated as a DM so they could feasibly watch over the scenes of their victim playing with a new partner. I can understand not wanting to excommunicate someone from your space, but what I don’t understand is giving them back the same exact power the’ve abused. I know from my own work sorting through these issues that usually the people causing issues are a minority, but having that one person will discourage dozens from attending. But these people aren’t usually removed because they are useful.

    This past week, I saw that person I removed from my community for really badly hurting someone lead the charge against someone who seems to also have done some questionable things, but not to the same degree. Watching him rally against a consent violator having power, while he left someone with scars they didn’t ask for, really draw my attention to the fact that much of the concern certain front facing organizations have around consent violations is self serving. On top of that, unfortunately, being in the position I’m in, I have seen people falsely accuse others in order to make a sort of political move within the scene. Often times what this looks like is mentioning something intentionally vague and allowing people to fill in the blanks and make up a story in their mind. And of course most people’s minds are going to go to the worst place when you say “consent violator”. When we remove someone, we don’t need for it to be a huge performance. We keep everyone informed of what’s going on and make a point of always being there to answer questions about bad actors, but it isn’t a humiliation ritual. Keep in mind, I don’t host play events anymore and I don’t earn money from my munch aside from the occasional tip. So when I call people out, it’s not so that they come to my party. It’s not so that they give me more money or join my group. It’s purely from a place of wanting people to be safe. Unfortunately, some people realy only think about money. 

    Dark Magic Society and Robin’s Sexual Assault

    When I first came into the community, I heard about a swinky (swing and kink) group  called Dark Magic Society. It was one of the first groups I was introduced to when I moved to Los Angeles. I’d heard a lot of good things about it, many people even describing it as a “family”. They conducted interviews that, if passed, would allow you to have a membership and officially join their group. The creator/organizer, Robin, was able to personally interview every single member herself along with her co-organizer Todd. Transparently, seeing her do this was inspiring to me and it likely inspired me to do some of what I’m doing now.

    However, I wouldn’t meet Robin personally until I started going to the Sherman Oaks Munch many years ago, before I even played with Pent. Back then, I was new to the scene in a newer phase of life. Like I said, I’d been through some shit and I figured DMS was a way of potentially trying to reconnect with swing in a more empowered part of my life. But I never really had time to do the required interview, but at a certain point, it seemed like Robin liked me enough, and over the years we’d interacted enough to where she very clearly cared less and less about me going through the process.

    Dark Magic Society’s reputation was more impressive than Robin.

    Robin was… constantly drunk. In all the years I’ve interacted with her, I think I’ve probably only seen her sober a few times. Whenever I saw her at the Sherman Oaks Munch, she was always very forward, very pushy, very indifferent to my boundaries. Transparently, I started to develop a bit of anxiety around going to the Sherman Oaks Munch and interacting with her because she was so incredibly pushy. I would write these posts on Fetlife about how I didn’t appreciate being touched by anyone, but especially by women, and she would like to interact with them. Even sending me messages very ironically supporting what I was saying. Since she’s a drunk, I basically always blamed her boundary crossing as an aspect of that.

    There was a moment where I was connecting with this British man. A diver with a home in Mid City. There were certain types of play I was interested in exploring and he invited me to his home during a party he was hosting for Robin. At a certain point at this party, I was naked, walking around the house as everyone else was and when I met Robin in the kitchen, speaking to her and others in passing, she decided to grope me. This really bothered me because I know that she read, responded to and even had conversation with me about how much I don’t like being touched, especially by women and yet she did it anyways. Mind you, a huge aspect of my trauma relates to people very habitually dehumanizing me in moments like this. I get the impression often that people view my black trans body as incapable of having boundaries or saying no. People have this very habitual way.of violating my personal space, white women especially. There’s this sense of familiarity white women often assume with me that feels like they’re placing me in a pet-like position and deciding that I don’t get to have boundaries around being touched because I am perpetually beneath them. I’ve become very used to dismissing women who violate my consent, but it bothered me in this instance because I’m generally able to have that stupid thought in the back of my head that maybe, just maybe they didn’t mean it that way. But she interacted with my posts about it and then decided to violate me knowing it’s not what I wanted. Touching me on its own is bad, but it was made worse by the fact that she was seemingly aware that this was an anxiety of mine.

    Transparently, I sometimes feel like I am being homophobic when I have the sharply negative reaction to women touching me. At the Sherman Oaks Munch, I wondered if I should be okay with how much she pushes herself onto me if I’m going to be a more sex-positive person. I also recognized that Robin likely struggles with an addiction and for that reason, maybe isn’t always super aware of what she’s doing. I’m constantly defaulting to that. So even though she sexually assaulted me, on paper I made a ton of excuses for it. Maybe my response is homophobic; maybe I deserved it because my tits were out, or maybe she’s too drunk to realize what she’s doing. I don’t know. Women have sexually assaulted me several times in my life and I’m always made to feel like it should impact me less than the men who’ve sexually assaulted me
    Because I am a munch host who meets a lot of newbies, I make a point of being aware of the scene and what’s going on so that I can advise people. With time, I saw that DMS was only good because of how great the attendees were. Robin is an almost entirely negative experience and many people within the scene have clashed with her. Aside from sexually assaulting me, there are other reasons I’ve historically been concerned about her events.

    The Nazis and the Kids

    There were two instances of bad decisions that I’ve called Robin out for and I’ll let you tell me whether or not they’re justified. I respect that my sensibilities aren’t everyone’s.

    First issue was DMS had a villains vs heroes event and someone decided to show up in full Nazi regalia. The owner renting to Robin is the son of Holocaust survivors, and as a person who’s thrown events there, I know his FIRST rule is against race play. Apparently she did not read the rules and got very angry with the owner for being upset that someone in nazi regalia showed up to their venue. Now, I hear all the arguments for why some wouldn’t see this as a huge deal, and as an organizer I definitely understand that sometimes you can’t act as quickly as you’d like, but Robin was, of course, wasted at the time and could not act. Affter the fact, her minions would go on to defend the person who showed up in Nazi regalia all over Fetlife. To me, there’s a distinct difference between being slow to respond and low-key endorsing the behavior. Sorry but, to me, anything less that outright condemnation against Nazism makes you complicit. The proper response would be a sober one and it would not at any point offer sympathy towards the people cosplaying fascism. If you want to do nazi play, do it in the appropriate context around people who consent. I don’t want to hear about why its not actual nazism; that doesn’t matter. The dungeon had strict rules against it and if Dark Magic Society is going to present themselves as an inclusive event, then it makes sense for people to take issue with their light defense of Nazi play. Naturally, as a person whose munch is very colorful, queer, and diverse, when people tell me they’re interested in going to DMS, I mention the Nazis. Why shouldn’t I?

    Second issue is a man who was once part of our group, who was married to a woman in our group was in the midst of a divorce. DMS was throwing a sex pool party later in the day and apparently earlier in the day, they also had a children’s pool party and between the kids pool party and the sex party, Robin allowed the ex-husband to bring their child to the venue of their sex party. Now, this is just a home with a pool and the child was not exposed and there’s a lot of arguments for why drawing attention to that is kinda silly, and I do understand that. However, what I had received was simply that the husband was taking the child to the venue and I spoke about how that made me uncomfortable. While I understand why many wouldn’t care about this, to me, it was very concerning that no red flags went off at any point in Robin’s mind. This is a dicey case where the mom very clearly does not want the child to be swimming at that venue. Even if we exclude the sex party aspect of it, that’s still something to be concerned with because he’s actively taking the child somewhere his mother isn’t comfortable with and I just don’t exactly understand why any of those things even had to happen to begin with. So it’s not like I don’t understand the point by point reasons why this wouldn’t be a big deal to someone, to me, it was just an example of a bad choice that could have been avoided. We should want children far away from this scene and the mother was right to be concerned about it, even if the kid wasn’t ultimately exposed to anything. In retrospect, I could have not said anything about that, and probably shouldn’t have, but it’s something that concerned me. I never want to stop being vigilant around kids at this scene.

    Robin Defends Pent, By Falsely Accusing Me

    Recently Dom Con happened in Los Angeles and Sir Pent, now Madame Pent, was in attendance. This reinvigorated the conversation around what they’ve done and someone reached out to Robin to inform her about it. My post about it is one of the most prominent on Fetlife and because she doesn’t like me for calling her out, she decided to respond to this message calling me a liar and describing me as “one of the scene’s biggest consent violators”.

    So a person who’s sexually assaulted me is accusing me of sexual assault. Not only that, she’s saying Im one of the BIGGEST consent violators in the scene and the context of that is her defending a consent violator who now owns a dungeon who’s harmed many people over the years.

    I cannot stress to you how much I immediately regret not making a bigger deal of her assaulting me after I read that. How fucking dare she. If Robin were being honest, she’d say that the few times I’ve come to her event, I’ve never played. In fact, she can only say I’ve played at that one event where she sexually assaulted me. Anyone who knows me in the scene knows that I don’t typically play with ANYONE because of how deeply traumatized I am. I am very scared of opening myself up. I historically let people approach me and unfortunately I can say that pretty much every person I’ve bottomed for has some sort of accusation against them. I feel pretty paralyzed in the scene not just because of trauma but because of my job. I am worried about sharing intimacy with people who are just trying to get close to me for clout-y reasons. One of the only people anyone can say they’ve seen me bottom for was a person who kinda did that. When it comes to Pent, there are a lot of witnesses to what he did to me and a lot of people who remember when it happened. Okay so you don’t like me because I’ve called you out, that doesn’t make me a consent violator.

    Robin is making a very boldly false accusation against me, not because they want to keep the community safe, but because she does not want for me to cut into her bottomline. She threatened to sue me for damages to her business. THAT is what she cares more about than anything. What’s crazy is now that I know what I know, I’m aware of the fact that there are SO MANY people who are regulars at her events who are dangerous people. One of her besties who continues to pursue me, just got arrested for domestic violence. The man who took the kid to her pool party was abusive towards his ex. She surrounds herself with people who have harmed others and now she’s spreading a bold face lie about me being a consent violator; not to protect anyone, but because she doesn’t like me.

    As a rape survior, its honestly really distressing seeing the way that people utilize the experiences of survivors to get a certain response from the scene. I hate to acknowledge and even support the idea that false accusations occur, but they absolutely do. People DO exaggerate about the facts of what happened, not because someone is dangerous, but because they want to remove them from the scene. In the recent incident we had to look into, there were aspects of the accusations made against someone that, to us, felt like they may be that. We were concerned that people were trying to rally together to remove someone from the scene because of personal conflict. And seeing people I know personally to be consent violators advocating for a punishment they never received for the greater degree of harm they caused just made it pretty clear to me that protecting victims was not the top priority. Something else was.

    Maybe I really don’t get it because, frankly, I don’t care very deeply about “clout” in the scene. Maybe it’s the context in which I entered the scene. I live a life that is more open than most and I have passion, so I dedicate myself to holding space for people in the scene. If anything, the only real thing I get from it is feeling like I have a ton of kinky friends. That fulfills me and is enough for me. For Robin and Pent this is a business. Drawing attention to their misdeeds cuts into their business. Both Robin and Pent were people that were attracted to me and mistreated me for not reciprocating their feelings. Both of them did what they did not anticipating that I would develop into the person I currently am. They rely on silence and since I’ve known them, they have repeatedly attempted to silence me for speaking about what they’ve done to me.

    Why I’m Posting About This Here

    This should not be such a common experience in the BDSM community, but it is. And the only reason why I’m posting this to my website is because I have exhausted almost every other form of communication. Robin made a point of getting all of my posts about her that don’t name her explicitly removed. So i’m going keep this one on my website where it will reach much more people outside of the LA community. I wanted to just make a few few posts for the people who’d actually need to see this information. For the people who are actually in this community I had no intention of directing that amount of attention on the scene. If Pent and Robin had not expended so much effort to remove the posts I made in the appropriate channels, I’d feel less inclined to use my larger platforms that they cannot silence.

    Because both Pent and Robin create spaces for newbies, I feel like it’s very important for SOMEONE to say that they are not safe. I thought I was alone in my experiences with them until I started openly speaking about those experiences. Since making my previous posts, I’ve received many messages about Robins abusive behavior. Much of it making references to her daughter, who apparently attends her events from time to time. A lot of the stories were just her being sexually forward and pushy with complete strangers. One story I received described her grabbing a woman by her hair without her consent and forcing her to the ground. I have kept silent about this woman for far too long. I’ve tried to privately warn people about it, but every month I have people who come to my event and mention their interest in going. As a person who tries to be inclusive, the nazi shit was very concerning to me. The most concerning. More concerning to me than what she did to me, but I think that’s because I’m used to minimizing the harm people do directly to me. Let’s take everything else I said out of the equation: if I heard that an organizer defended someone in nazi gear at their event, I’d lose all desire to party with those people. When that incident happened, I still told people to make up their minds for themselves. Now seeing her spreading lies about me that are objectively untrue has made me regret offering that nuanced view of her actions.

    She is relying very heavily on racism and transphobic bias that eagerly believes that black transgender women are somehow predisposed to sexual violence. Everyone who has observed me in the scene knows that I am incredibly hesitant to play with new people. I haven’t had a new BDSM partner in a very long time. Very few people in the scene can say they’ve seen me play, let alone know who I’ve played with. People would describe me as confident, they would not describe me as forward, or aggressive or deceptive. Those who do, are typically responding to their own discomfort. I am very paranoid about connecting with people and require a ton of reassurance from people I share intimacy with because of trauma. I know that her lies will not outdo the work that I’ve done, but I am frankly flabbergasted by the degree of audacity she has. People like Robin are used to never quite seeing a consequence to their actions.

    If you’ve followed my discussions about BDSM, you’ll know that I’ve mentioned these stories in those discussions. I’ve made several videos over the years that reference the many things that i’m sharing here without saying the names of those involved. I’m thankful for my habit of documenting my growth in the scene because I learned a lot from these experiences and I frankly just want for more people to know that some of these groups don’t have your best interest at heart. You will be discarded if one of their friends assaults you or if they leaders have an interest in you and it’s not reciprocal. While I definitely believe that people can change, I am very confident that these people have not changed as both Pent and Robin work over time to protect their businesses from people who they’ve used their power to harm. At a certain point, both of them had the ability to make the right decisions, but refused to do so. They are poor leaders who rely quite seriously on you either not knowing any better or being indifferent enough to them doing wrong that you don’t make a fuss. Standing up against Robin has been hard mostly because of the cult around her. At the end of the day, she’s upset with me because i warned people about her defense of nazism and indifference to child safety. And she feels that way, AFTER she assaulted me. I haven’t spoken openly about her assault, but now I have no problems doing it. I would have liked to have kept this not as public as this, but Robin forced my hand. I refuse to be silent. 

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  • Unblemished

    She’s young, unblemished, and unbruised. Her skin is clear, and so is her mind. She knows nothing. She feels nothing but curiosity, mostly about men. She feels incomplete without him. She’s receptive, patient, and fascinated with everything he says. His hobbies are hers, for she has none. No personality of her own. A blank slate to project onto. A canvas to paint. A mound of clay eager to take shape. Whichever he pleases, whichever he desires. She knows not of pleasure but is pleased by his. She’s quiet and slight, and her ignorance means she will always follow, never lead. Her thoughts are his. Her aspirations are his. Her desires, also his. Her body, too. It bends and moves for his eyes, at his command, the way he likes; the way he prefers. He is her morning and her night: her first thought and last.

    I was her once.

    He cultivated her and sliced each of her leaves, which was pleasing to his eye but left her with deep wounds. No longer young, she was significantly blemished, with bruises that were truly fractured. She painted herself green and dipped herself in red dye, but eventually, her petals withered. Eventually, they fell. And from the ground, she gathered her past and adorned her own body with it—the way she wanted. She struggled with placement at first; after all, she’s never dressed herself. But with practice, trial and error, she became something different. She knew of pleasure, her own. She became loud and large, with knowledge that she commands with authority. Her aspirations and desires are hers. She bends and moves her own body because it satisfies her, for that is her preference. She goes to bed moisturized, and wakes up moisturized. And if she keeps a man in her life, it’s because he comes with a watering can, not sheers.

    I am her now.

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  • Politically Queer, Socially Heterosexual

    I think, to some degree, I’ve always struggled with being deified. Contrary to popular belief, I didn’t throw the first brick at Stonewall. Historically, I’ve been more like the quiet wife of one of the policemen who participated in the raid. I spent my 20s trying to fade away into the background and seeing that as a sign of ultimate personal success. I suppose for that reason, I feel very odd existing in the way I do, where it seems to be disruptive of me to say that while I may be politically queer, I’m quite socially heterosexual.  

    Since my mother passed, I’ve been thinking a lot about my life path and how it compares to hers. Going through my mother’s things, I realized we had so much in common. More than I ever recognized or celebrated when she was alive. I realized that I am the version of my mother that broke away fully from a lot of the conventions that have historically been quite common within our family. Of course our experiences are quite different with me being transgender, but we are so similar in so many ways. I watched my mother, a Harvard grad, seemingly put a bit of her greatness aside in order to perform a traditional, heterosexual, Christian role. Despite my mother being more accomplished than my father, she became a woman who followed my father’s desires whether they made sense or not. I didn’t fully process this until I was older, but I think seeing her do that made me feel as if doing the same within my own relationships was some form of success.  

    Who I am in my 30s is very inspired by who I was in my 20s: a girl who desired a more traditional life where I would of course be relegated to my home and labor around the house. I used to idealize that so much that I always felt like whatever I wanted wasn’t nearly as important as whatever the man in my life currently desired. I spent most of my 20s figuring out ways to make myself seem smaller, slighter, less apparent, and less disruptive. How could I convince this man I was in love with that I’d make a good wife? Each life skill acquired, not necessarily for me. I took me a while to break through the matrix and realize that wasn’t what I really wanted, and looking at my mother when she passed, it’s hard for me not to notice how many things she wanted to do that were never done largely because she opted to have a more traditional life. I realized that I’m living a life where I’m able to at least try to pursue some of those things and so my 30s have been all about me learning to be bolder, bigger, more apparent and more straightforward.  

    Moving to Los Angeles and intentionally pursuing this path, I started being recognized more regularly as a queer person. Not usually a trans person, but quite often a sapphic person. Tragically, I am not sapphic, but a lot of people who meet me assume I am in some way. From what I’ve gathered, it’s because I am more overtly sex positive and alternative than most people, and for a lot of people, that’s an indicator of someone being not quite fully heterosexual. But I was quite different before I moved to the city.  

    A good example of how I used to dress when I was stealth in the OC.  

    Before moving to Los Angeles, I spent 6 years in Orange County in some of the more conservative parts of the county. In all my years socializing in the OC, I never met anyone who identified as queer. Maybe one girl who was trying to get me to have a threesome with her friend…but even then; I only heard about her being bisexual through someone else. I spent my 20s being very isolated in spaces where no one was openly queer, and stealth encouraged me to distance myself from anyone and everything that could be recognized as queer. I was always an outspoken pro-LGBT person; but when I say that I mean in very narrow circumstances, usually with people I knew, in private conversations, I’d offer lukewarm affirmations of gay relationships. When you’re a straight person doing that, you can easily feel like you’re being radical, but being around queer people is actually quite a different experience. It’s one thing to support something theory, it’s another when they become real, tangible people who’d likely draw attention to the unhelpful heterosexist things you internalize that aren’t directly challenged when you’re speaking of someone theoretically, but not engaging with them personally. 

    I had plenty of queer friends in college, but that was a 4 year span of my life that ultimately doesn’t really overtake the majority of my life where I knew very few queer people. In Highschool, I was probably the most openly queer person I knew. My rainbow clothes and splatter paint everything sort of gave it away. I had a more radical queer identity and during that phase of my life, I was attempting to break away from the expectations of my parents. I was trying to become my own person and, again, even that was about a 2-3 year span of my life. Yeah, it was pretty radical for me to have a mohawk and do research papers about different conceptions of gender and sexuality around the world, but ultimately, I hadn’t been in community with other queer people. I dreamed of running away to the city and going to Tiger Heat with a bunch of other LGBT people, but that never really happened. Instead, I continued to be surrounded by heterosexual people within a conservative area. As I transitioned, I very quickly went from being mildly radical within these spaces to just someone in the background who fell into the same patterns as everyone else.  

    Those patterns are my modus operandi. Being recognized as queer is odd for me because I spent most of my adult life with people assuming, correctly that I’m a straight woman and putting me into a certain category for that reason. I’m used to deferring to men and speaking to them a certain way. I’m used to people expecting me to be of use. I used to slipping into a unique harmonic tone and rhythm when speaking to other women. I’m used to shifting my tone to seem pleasant and being very concerned that I seem less than pleasant. As I’ve moved to Los Angeles and connected with queer women, sapphic or otherwise, I realize that many of them do not have these patterns. I admire it. I recognize that they are living lives where they don’t think about these things the way I do. I envy how many of the queer women I know have a boldness about them that always reinforces their boundaries and reiterates that they are not here for the pleasure or entertainment of men. I have a deep resentment for the part of me that falls into these patterns so easily. It happens sometimes when I run into other people from the OC or otherwise more conservative areas. People would often assume that I have a hard time in these spaces or moving through the world in this way, but in all reality, it’s what I’m more familiar with. It’s like we’re part of the same cult or something. 

    Because these patterns feel so central to me, I’ve often struggled with the idea of “queer” as a label that I really identified with. While I’ve changed a lot as a person, the thing that remains the same, is I feel the most radical thing about me is entirely what I say and do, and less who I am. I understand that I am a black transgender woman, I represent an extremely stigmatized and often violently attacked population, but clinging to that often feels like clinging to dogma. My race has always presented more robust hurtles and I can confidently say that when it comes to discrimination, for me, it’s mostly been racial. Even in the narrow circumstances I’ve been in where I’ve been openly trans within these more conservative spaces, there was always a sense of handwaving the trans part of me because I was otherwise assimilated into their conception of womanhood, at least socially. I may complain a lot, but in all reality, people often treat me quite well and I know it’s because I tend to move through the world with this particular suburban, heterosexual, loosely Christianized, overly polite way of presenting myself. While I used to have a lot of frustrations around DL men, that hasn’t been the case for most of the age-appropriate dating years. When people see me with my partners, our racial difference is more stigmatized than anything else. It’s hard for me not to think of “queer” as a title for those who challenge the status quo of gender and sexuality. I feel like the only area I really do that is my polyamory, honestly.  

    It feels like needless essentialization to say that I would be defined as queer solely because I happen to also be transgender. I’d probably feel differently if my work wasn’t the only area in my life where I found myself regularly speaking about being transgender. Aside from conversations with potential romantic partners, it’s not something that really comes up. I know that feels odd to say, but it’s an honest report of my life. When I was that kid with a mohawk, I was actively living in a way where I challenged assumptions of gender and sexuality, but now the assumptions made of my gender and sexuality are typically true, save for the instances where people assume I’m sapphic. As a political label, I have no problems aligning myself with queerness, but I suppose it feels odd to me to say that I myself am queer in the way many people I know who identify as queer are. I recognize the immensely complex journey I’ve gone through, but that journey feels very far away from my life today. A footnote with shoddy attribution.  

    As I said, there’s such a difference between being a sole advocate for queer people in a conservative area and being in a community with queer people. What I’ve realized recently is, on the timeline of my life, I’m realistically still just a few years into truly socializing with queer people. Many of my own assumptions of queer people based on what I’ve read, but not experienced have been turned on their head. I can now say that within my friend groups, I tend to be the token straight girl. I find queer people to be more fun, less serious and more open. That’s who I’m trying to be in my 30s. I’m trying to break away from those patterns, but it’s also quite bizarre that, because I’m a black trans woman, people tend to extend a great degree of queer street cred to me that really overstates how out and open I’ve historically been. Offline, it’s like my life has been defined by these phases of hiding myself. Initially hiding that I was trans as a child, then after coming out as trans, hiding that I was for the sake of stealth and passing. And these days, because my transness is synonymous with my work, telling people what I do for a living almost immediately outs me and that’s something I’m still getting used to.  

    I know that for people who’ve followed my blog for a while, it seems strange to say, but before the pandemic started, I had just shy over 100k subscribers on YouTube and my average video got less than 20k views. That’s not nothing, but I was definitely a far more niche creator than I currently am. I used to mostly make videos about being transgender, which meant that my content was only really relevant to the extreme minority of people searching for that kind of content online. This allowed me to be stealth while also having a YouTube channel. Long term followers of my YouTube channel will remember that I once removed all of my content and decided to go faceless for a while when I first started to date my ex. I once felt like being out as trans would ruin my entire life so even if I had a little bit of a presence online, I still went to great lengths to separate my online and offline life. That’s one of the only reasons I use the alias “Kat Blaque” online. These days, it’s pretty typical for me to be recognize when I’m out and about, but even then, I’ve discovered there’s a segment of my audience that for some reason misses each video where I mention that I’m transgender. I suppose it’s because I’ve never been a person who waves a pride flag, I’m not sure. Offline, I find that I tend to only be recognizable in liberal areas. I experience invisibility in more conservative cities, and invisibility is what I spent most of my life fighting for. It’s what I’m the most accustomed to.  

    Grabbing Margaritas in Hollywood at 33.

    I do recognize that in a cissexist world where everyone is expected to be cis and heterosexual, there are a lot of boring people who’d look at the point-by-point of my life and say, “You’re queer.” However, it feels like bending to essentialism to agree with this interpretation. People have tried to tell me who I was since the day I was born. I’m used to it. At least once a week, someone online (because it only happens online, never offline) tells me that in fact, I am actually a gay man. And it’s laughable because even when I didn’t have a binary identity, I was certainly not recognized as a man; or even boy. I’ve struggled with how I tend to be registered socially and how people register me as an idea. I suppose that’s what it’s like being on the other side of that conundrum where your reality conflicts with the working narrative people seem to have of you based on their narrow conception of others who share parts of your identity.  

    I often feel as though many people do not recognize that not all transgender women are in a constant state of transition or reaffirming their gender identity. Some of us reach a point where discussing being transgender starts to feel like needlessly drawing attention to the pimple on your forehead or the freckle on your neck. It’s a part of us, but it doesn’t define us. For many of us who transition, we reach a point of invisibility and we often have to decide to be more vocally open about who we are as a way of reminding those around us that while you may assume we are normative, we in fact are not. Some people identify so deeply with that activist spirit that it becomes a strong characteristic of their persona. I’ve met many absolutely beautiful trans women who “pass” who will tell you that they are “trannies” within the first conversation you have with them. There are some of us who move in a way where we are constantly, intentionally, drawing attention to the differences we have as a form of political action, and then there are those of us who find peace in simply allowing society to make a mostly accurate assumption of us based on our appearances. It still requires a lot of practice and strength for me to speak of myself offline openly as a transgender person. I’ve spent most of my life without that language in my vocabulary. It’s gotten easier with my public speaking, but unlike some of those trans women I’ve met who define themselves in their first few breaths, that’s just not something I have practice with. Despite being 33, I feel like if I am “queer”, I’m still a baby.  

    It’s all very possible that my feelings around this will one day change. It’s all very possible that I’ll reach a point where I feel confident in a queer identity and I don’t feel this need to constantly reaffirm that I am heterosexual, used to being assumed as such and have only moved through the world being known as such my entire adult life. Frankly, I feel quite silly inferring that vocalizing my heterosexuality is a sort of struggle, but it does frustrate me that so many people seem to assume that I have a uniquely queer perspective. I feel like there’s a layer of the world I genuinely don’t experience that many queer people do. Even the alternative subcultures I participate in are typically very heterosexual. I have no conception of some of the queerer sides of many of the communities I’m part of. Much of what drives my curiosity of queer culture relates to that. A whole layer of culture that feels distinctly separated from what I currently know. I’ve read more than I’ve experienced. Advocated for more than broken bread with. I catch myself thinking ignorant thoughts and drawing heterosexist comparisons and being disappointed in myself for being ignorant despite what I’ve professed.  

    As I get older, I recognize more and more that I have so much capacity for growth. That with each year, I learn something new about myself that shifts me in a more genuine direction. Maybe my feelings around this will change one day, but for now it seems pretty truthful of me to say that while I may be politically queer, I’m still very socially heterosexual. Maybe that’ll change one day. Maybe it won’t. 

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  • Fetishized on Frenchman: A New Orleans Rendezvous


    Recently, I decided to take a jaunt down to New Orleans for Jazzfesst 2024. Since restrictions have been lifted, I love to travel, and I’ve made a point of taking advantage of the little bit of extra cash I have to explore the places I’ve once dreamed of. New Orleans was, for me, a fantasy land for so long. It was the setting for many of my favorite bits of media. When I first went to New Orleans it was to speak at Tulane University and ever since then, I fell in love. The air in New Orleans is heavy, the streets full of history and perseverance. It’s a city that shouldn’t exist, but continues to. I suppose it’s that spirt that I feel also flows through me. Perhaps that’s why I always feel so at home there. I’m aware of the fact that I see New Orleans through the lens of a tourist, but it’s one of the few places I’ve visited that I’ve decided I must visit at least once a year. So when an executive told me they were going to the first week of the fest, I figured that would be a good excuse to go there myself. While I was in town, I did what I usually do when I travel. Cultivate my experience the old fashioned way; showing a bit of leg and looking for a handsome man with a bit more knowledge of the local scene. I always try to do the locals; I mean, what the locals do.

    Ready to hit the town

    I enjoy using dating apps as a way to connect men to local men on my travels. Frankly, it’s become a bit of a life hack for me because I find that the shit that pops up on Google is never as good as the shit you stumble into with a handsome guide. On this trip, it wasn’t looking like I’d be able to find one. I was just in town for the weekend and as it turns out, people had plans! However, I connected with this one guy who was also visiting New Orleans, but had lived here for many years. He was peculiar, quirky and dominant. All qualities I tend to prefer in men. He, along with his wife and children were all visiting NOLA for Jazzfest as well! How awesome that we managed to cross paths! He was a white man from the east coast and we had a lot of mutual interests and commonality. I organize sex positive events and as it turns out, so did he and his wife. So on Saturday evening when he invited me to meet him at a bar with his wife, as I had nothing else to do and no other handsome guides to show me around, I said fuck it! I’m a lot more openminded on vacation, I suppose.

    I think one of my most pronounced areas of hypocrisy is when I’m looking for men locally, I tend to be very very discerning, especially nowadays. If I’m being frank, I like men but don’t trust them to be honest with me, or themselves, on average. Something I pieced together a bit too late is that a lot of men actually enjoy securing sexual experiences through some form of coercion or dishonesty. A few weeks ago, this guy who recently got back with his girlfriend wanted to fuck me in the back of his car while his girlfriend was fast asleep. I said no, of course (I only fuck men with girlfriends if their girlfriend is fully aware of it), but that’s stuck with me for the past week or so. When we were having our regular thing, he was a sweetheart. When we called it off, he revealed to me how willing he was to lie because it turned him on. It disappointed me because it reaffirmed my hesitation to connect with men.

    I am a polyamorous black transgender woman in her 30s… I basically exist in this very genuine, very open, cards are all on the table kinda way. I have better sex when I’m honest, which is why if I plan on having sex with someone, always tell them that I’m transgender. I just don’t have the patience for experiences that are less than satisfying to me at this point in my life… but I guess when i’m on vacation I have more patience… and lower standards. I’m sure to some people reading this, it seems like I may be using men for local food and drink suggestions and company, but to me, I’m getting something (usually for free) from men who overwhelmingly only have a desire to use me. Requiring that they meet me somewhere public usually gets rid of most of the users and fetishists. And I suppose if I’m going to start dating someone that I meet while on vacation, it’s gonna be the man with the plan who takes initiative. Otherwise, i’m pretty fine on my own. In general, I’ve had a lot of positive experiences with this approach and one of my current long term partners is a man I met while on vacation in Portland and I care for him very much… but back to this guy.

    So I pull up to Anna’s bar on Royal, and he’s there with his wife, who is absolutely exhausted from traveling on the same day. Transparently, I consumed an entire Delta-9 lollipop on my walk over, and it didn’t quite hit until I started sharing a joint with them. The wife waited for her uber back to the hotel, but I was glad that I got to meet her. I get so tired of married men not communicating with their wives that it really engendered a degree of trust within me that I probably wouldn’t otherwise have. I’ve met a lot of married men on my trips who are trying to cheat on their wives and I guess that’s what always disappoints me about New Orleans. NOLA is essentially the Las Vegas of the south. A lot of people go there to let loose in ways they wouldn’t back home. It’s clear that for that reason, some of the men who travel to New Orleans are particularly fascinated by me. When I say that my standards are often lower when I travel, mean that in LA, it’s very hard for me to justify making time to meet up with anyone unless I’ve had extensive conversations with them that indicate that they are not fetishizing me. Being a black transgender woman, there are a lot of men who only seem to be able to interact with me through the lens of fetishism. I don’t enjoy that, so generally it’s important to me that really clarify if someone is interested in me, or just trying to fulfill a fantasy.

    But fuck it. Let’s have a good time. We’re in New Orleans .

    Performers at the Apple Barrel

    He takes me to Frenchman Street where we listen to some live jazz in the little red bar on the corner. I always try to go to The Apple Barrel when I’m in town. We wait for the band to play and continue talking about ourselves and I learn a lot about him and some of the really cool renovations he’s done recently. I have a weakness for men who build things. He actually shares a lot of qualities with my partner in Portland who is also hand-y and enjoys making large and unruly things, but also delicate things like jewelry. To me, little things like that set a good foundation for me having a fascination with someone as an individual. I also build and create things, but feel like my job doesn’t often allow me the freedom to do as much as I’d like. So it’s always cool when I see other people build and create things.

    After listening to some jazz, we went to this really cool event at The Domino and danced the night away. I love to dance, and he was pretty good at it. I feel like you can always tell if a man’s good in bed by how he dances. I pretty much never sleep with the men I meet on vacation, but if I’m being honest, I was becoming curious. I’ve recently realize that I’ve held myself back from having a lot of experiences because of trauma and I’ve been trying to push through that. I tend to hold myself back a lot from connecting with people, and it’s usually because I have a long history of sharing my body with men who didn’t really respect it. Like I said earlier, I’ve accepted that far too many men actually get off on expressing some form of dishonesty that encourages you to make yourself sexually available to them. So even when I really want to, or the idea is hot to me, I usually don’t actually do it. Transparently, I also have 4 long term partners whose sexual health I care for and that also stops me from doing it, even if it’s something my partners would be ok with. None of them go it on the first night. I had to develop trust with them. I had to learn that they truly meant what they said because I’ve learned so many men will simply say the right thing to get the result they desire. Frankly, I’m in the phase of my life where I am the most sexually satisfied. Where I’m finally able to open my eyes, enjoy sex and closeness for real intimacy shared between two people who greatly care for one another. For most my life, sex has been a performance I do for the satisfaction of those who lie to me, but have things I need. What I’ve wanted doesn’t matter. But my partners know me, I know them, I trust them and I have no question about their intentions. I don’t question whether they fetishize me or are simply with me because they are excited by our racial difference. I know that they’re there for me and that allows me to relax and give myself to them fully. I may be ambiently flirty, but I’m not generally very intimate or open with men unless I know I can trust them.

    Monday morning, I had to check out of my AirBnB and I had a few hours to kill so him and I went on a ghost tour with him around the quarter. I’ve been on many of these at this point, but it was still really enjoyable and it was nice to spend more time with him. Even though I haven’t been really receptive to new partners recently, I did like him and before saying goodbye to him, I told him that I’d love to visit him on the east coast as he lives in one of the cities I know the least about. It would be nice to go somewhere and just have someone, especially someone you already connected with. Especially someone you’re already attracted to. But my feelings around this started to shift after the fact and I was reminded of why I don’t typically agree to connect with people so quickly.

    He would send me point-by-point updates of his vacation. I thought those were kinda fun because he was doing things with his kids that I didn’t even know were options on my trip. I’ve only experienced New Orleans as a sexually liberated adult so it was cool to see what someone would do on a family vacation. I enjoyed the updates, but I am not a very prolific texter. I try to not be on my phone more than I need to so i’m not as responsive as I’m sure he wanted me to be. One of the peculiar updates he kept sending me though, were photos of several black women whom he thought looked exactly like me. The first was a photo of a photo in a coffee shop. A black girl with brown/black locs and glasses wearing black. Her facial features didn’t look anything like mine, and her hair was abit longer, but I guess she had a but of a gothy style so okay maybe I see how he could think we looked alike. Then he sent another of a street performer with, at least to me, very obviously east African features that don’t look much at all like my west African features. This one had long box braids and she was a street performer, so I suppose she expected to have her photo taken? But still, she looked nothing like me. She was just black with a vaguely similar hair style. She was gorgeous, but looked nothing like me. Then he sent me another photo. A black woman dining with a white man. She had longer locs and a much more conservative style and it occurred to me that he was just walking around taking photos of black women… this was odd. Mind you, New Orleans has a very large black population. In fact, that’s one of the things I enjoy about it! So it’s not like…it’s uncommon for black women to be in New Orleans. It just occurred to me that FOR HIM, it must be particularly exciting to see a black woman. And that’s when it really occurred to me that while he may have appreciated other aspects of me, he was more fixated on our racial difference than I had realized.

    I suppose this is the point where I tell you, from my perspective, why this felt like I was being fetishized and how that compares to my current partners who are white who very much do not do that. Firstly, I can’t actually think of a time any of my partners have compared me to other black women, and if they did, they were women who actually did look like me and shared features or a style that was similar to mine. It’s not so much the comparison that feels fetish-y to me as much as you’d have to have a very narrow perspective to think I would be excited to see… another black woman. It reminds me of the time where I was a regular at this bar and I would get constantly mixed up with a much younger, much shorter, much thinner, black girl with a very different style. When someone slipped up and called me by her name, it was clear to me that all they saw between us was our race. Despite the fact that we were cartoonishly different in both style and personality, to the white person primarily seeing our race, we are essentially the same person. And it’s not so much seeing our race that’s the issue, it’s the fact that you see nothing else that is. When white people do this, I know that they are simply not having the same experience. They see us as interchangeable and barely unique. It would be be understandable if we had a similar cadence or aura, but we almost never do. So someone showing me photos of other black women, knowing how horny they were for me, makes it clear to me that they carry a similar type of unconscious bias that is accented by their sexual attraction towards me. It’s very obviously racial fetishism to me and none of my current partners have come close to doing anything like this to me. They recognize that I am uniquely Kathryn.

    I wrote on this blog a while back that despite currently having multiple white men as partners, I think my desire to date new white men has very much dwindled specifically because of stuff like this. Yes, I’m a black woman and yes, my skin is beautiful, but I’m much more than that. I was attracted to this guy because he seemed creative, open minded, quirky and he enjoyed building and creating things. Those are the primary features that stood out to me about him, not his race. However, when he was thinking of me, he thought mostly of my race. This is a massive issue with, I’d say, most white men. Even the “woke” white men often carry deeply established bias that will always define me as the other. I heard so much about his wife, her qualities and what made her uniquely attractive and none of those things related to her race. I’m sure if I pointed out random white women with short hair and curvy bodies, he’d be defensive of his wife being unique to those women. However, for him, my race is a large factor and it’s not lost on me that this is a very common pattern among white men who marry white women.

    I’ve often been seen as the exotic other by men who choose to build their front facing, socially acceptable relationships with white cis women. That guy who wanted to cheat with me wanted to keep his white cis partner in the dark. He saw me as the cheap sex object and her as the thing to protect and hold onto. He got off on the dishonesty and while he blew smoke up my ass about how hot and amazing I was, he still chose me as his mistress and it’s hard for me to ignore the racial dynamic there. When I point this out, I’m always met with arguments about how it has nothing to do with race, there’s just far more white women in the country, but I’ve lived through this enough times to know what is and what isn’t. It’s not just a coincidence that within the polyamorous world, I know several black women who do not have primary partners, but are often on the receiving end of fixation and fascination from white men who are married to white women. Coincidences happen, but there’s probably a reason why my primary partner is a man of color. Very few white men are able to see women of color as anything more than something fun they do on the side or on their way to pursuing a relationship with a white woman that gives them more social capital. White men will deny this and say i’m projecting, but like I said, i’m a polyamorous black trans woman in her 30s; my patience around this is thin and I don’t want to put myself in another relationship where I have to later calculate that I was just being fetishized.

    So, I hesitated, but I decided to draw this to his attention. To express that these messages made me feel fetishized and that I didn’t like being in this position. Perhaps to him, it felt odd that I’d get the impression that he was racially fetishizing me, but what else am I to conclude from him sending me several photos of black women who look nothing like me interspersed between messages about his sexual desire for me? He was initially receptive to hearing what I had to say and was very deeply apologetic. He brought up his autism for the first time; a very common defense I’ve fielded when white men have made me or someone I’ve known uncomfortable. This guy was much older than me and while I completely believe he made it to that age, but didn’t quite know that what he did was odd, I know plenty of autistic people who’d know better. That aside, I still didn’t want to declaratively state that he WAS a fetishist, I just wanted to communicate to him that he was making me feel that way. I only told him that because we had a positive experience and I really wanted to continue speaking with him, but I was starting to lose interest as his following question made me realized he likely DID racially fetishize me.

    I was entertaining the conversation under the premise that he probably wasn’t actually fetishizing me until he tried to essentially argue that I was being hypocritical because my profile says, “I like Daddies.”. From that, I pieced together that he likely actually DOES fetishize black women and trans women because that’s really the only way that argument makes sense. The premise of the question equates my attraction to older dominant, caretaking type men to his fetishism of the skin I was born with and the gender I did not choose. I’ve had these arguments with a lot of white men who fetishize me. When he said this, I regretted mentioning it to him at all because so often “hey this makes me feel uncomfortable” is seen as a open invitation for debate. I’ve learned from my own mistakes that it doesn’t matter if you didn’t mean it that way, sometimes your actions can make someone feel that way. How you respond to that feedback is often an indication of where you’re at. I had no such desire to debate with him, I was just expressing how he made me feel and whether he meant it or not, I still felt that way and trying to essentially say “well you do it too” really indicated to me that we were not having the same conversation at all, and that he was indeed fetishizing aspects of me. There’s a very distinct difference between me being fetishized for my race and/or gender and me being attracted to “Daddies”. I told him I would write in my blog to explain the difference, though it seems very obvious to me.

    I’ve spoken many times on this blog about how fetishism alienates me largely because of a collection of very ignorant, untrue, hurtful tropes that I simply do not embody. When you’re a black transgender woman, you are stereotyped as an aggressive, dominant person with an incredibly large penis that you specifically use to dominate and subjugate white men. I’ve been on hormones for almost 2 decades, so there is no BBC to be found, and there wasn’t even before HRT. Many men who get off on this fetish don’t seem to understand that their shemale porn fantasies are just that, fantasies. That you will very rarely meet a transgender woman who is far into their transition who is well endowed because hormones actually decrease the size of your genitalia. While there are transgender women who are well endowed, they’re often trans women who are living in a way that often combats the long term goals of medical transition; if they even are on HRT to begin with. I’m 33 years old, and I started my hormonal transition at 19. I also am averse to dominating a man because of trauma and without getting into too much information, I couldn’t physically penetrate someone even if I wanted to. But for the fetishist, this is the primary fixation and I feel alienated by it because it’s not something I can perform, neither mentally or physically. It is simply not an option. So when men approach me with their fetishes, I have to then devote most of our time to explaining to them that I am submissive, I don’t want to fuck them; I can’t fuck them and I am not their fantasy, but a reality. So often, when I say these things, you can hear the disappointment in their voices. Sometimes I’ve been very clear about this being how I feel, only for men to, once again, believe that they can dishonestly trick me into changing my mind and making myself sexually available to them. it’s a very distinct line in the sand for me, but men who are fetishists are so aggressively fixated on it that they have historically violated my consent just so they can get off. That’s the major reason I don’t hook up with men. I’ve had so many experiences of men touching me where I don’t want to be touched and then being upset with me that I don’t enjoy what I told them I didn’t want. They never think I mean what I say.

    I’m someone who has experienced immense trauma at the hands of much older men, and I know that’s largely why I “like Daddies”. Now that it’s age-appropriate, I feel less bad about being attracted to older, responsible, protective men who enjoy leading in relationships. Unlike skin-tone or gender, no one is inherently a “Daddy”. Most older men aren’t Daddies, hell I’d say most men with kids aren’t even Daddies. To me, a Daddy is a very particular type of man and it’s a position that is earned through a demonstration of ability, not bestowed upon you because of gender. I feel very silly calling all men Daddy because most men don’t deserve the title; especially the title of being mine. So no, I don’t fetishize older men the way he fetishizes black women. It takes a lot more for me.

    Fetishism is a very complex issue, but to me, it comes hand in hand with being dehumanized. When people fetishize me, it’s very clear that I had no real choice or ability to self-define. I don’t just get to be Kathryn, a woman with eclectic interests, an incurable wanderlust and a base desire to give myself to a man who’s gained my trust. I’m a collection of assumptions, stereotypes and ex girlfriends who were also black or trans. I’m never allowed to just organically define myself, I must adhere to a series of stereotypes, or disappoint the person interested in fetishizing me. Often times when men find out I’m serious about not dominating them, they’re disappointed. When they find out that Im not a sexually aggressive hip hop video vixen, they’re disappointed. And I’ve witnessed this disappointment through my life. It’s part of why I really connect with the minority of men who’ve educated themselves enough to actually see me.

    When it comes to fetishism, my unpopular opinion is that everyone should be honest about it. I’m a pretty kinky person, but I don’t have many fetishes at all, and the few I do aren’t based on things people can’t change. This guy had all the woke markers on his and that made me feel comfortable enough to connect with him, but my experience of him after didn’t make me feel like he was “woke” at all. I think some people paint over their still-developing politic with definitive declarations of how progressive they are and this acts as a sort of bandaid that helps them ignore a much deeper wound left by being socialized in a society where isms are seen as solidly factual and contradicting them requires more than saying just a few poppy phrases. I would expect messages like that from someone whose first message to me was “I love black girls” or “I love black shemales”. As a person, I hold a lot of space for mistakes. I don’t expect perfection and I don’t expect people to always get it immediately. It’s clear to me that maybe if he doesn’t fetishize black women, he is still primarily seeing them as the other, and that excites him. I don’t want to be compared to other black women and I wasn’t comparing him to other white men. It would feel odd for me to do so, but likely because we live in a white supremacist society where the uniqueness of white people seems more pronounced to white people. That’s how subconscious biases work. I know he didn’t intend for me to have this reaction, but how confidently he sent it to me reveals that there’s still work to be done. And the thing is, most white men will likely never be interested in doing that work at all, and as a black woman who devotes and has devoted most of her living and waking hours to educating people about these things, it is exhausting to register that dating the average white guy comes with the burden of educating them. And even devoting a lot of time to figuring out if they’re fetishizing me is a lot of time and labor that I find less desirable with age. Many black women avoid dating white men all-together to just avoid having these experiences or doing that type of labor. And the older I get, I really get it. It’s hard for me to be attracted to men I’d have to teach not to dehumanize me.

    What I wore to Jazzfest

    All-in-all, I had a good time in New Orleans and while this was annoying, I’m not gonna say it ruined my trip because it didn’t. I really enjoyed the time we spent together, but it was another reminder of why I tend to be more discerning when it comes to men and why I probably shouldn’t easily entertain the interest of white men. At this point in my life, I can say that most of the white men who’ve expressed attraction to me were indeed fetishizing me. I’ve learned that when you withhold sex from these white men, you start to get a more reasonable vision of how they feel. If his wife hadn’t been so exhausted on this trip, we might have fooled around and I would have likely regretted that after putting two and two together. I find that white men who fetishize are very quick to rush you into bed and will lose interest if you don’t ever go for it. Each of my current partners pursued me pretty extensively over a course of time before we ever had sex; and like I said earlier, I’m in a phase of good sex with men I trust. The best sex of my life. At the end of the day, I’ve unfortunately shared my body with a lot of men who fetishize me and that sex is always so forgettable, but the trauma it’s caused, so memorable. I deserve better. My body is not a rehabilitation center for men.

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