Best Sex Writing 2012: The State of Today's Sexual Culture (10 page)

It started out as a traditional massage, relaxing and unhurried. Traditional except that he didn’t skip my breasts as nonsexual massage practitioners do. I felt my nipples harden to his touch. I arched my back in response to his gliding hands—strong, sure, gentle.

Would Robert approve of what I was doing? I couldn’t help flashing on this, which put me on the verge of tears. No, he wouldn’t approve or understand. But Robert would never touch me again, and I had to find my own way to reclaim the sensual and sexual life within me. I pulled my awareness back to the present, the gentle touch of this stranger offering pleasure, as much pleasure as I wanted. And I wanted it.

As Sunyata continued massaging me for a very long time (an hour, maybe?—time stopped), my whole body and brain began to quiver in anticipation. I felt my body rise and fall with his touch, his rhythm in sync with mine. I kept my eyes closed, focusing on the sensation.

I parted my thighs, and I could feel my own heat drawing his hands closer to my pleasure center. Finally, his hand cupped my vulva and waited. I rocked into his hand, my clitoris on fire. His hand moved expertly, slowly, gently, waiting for my response with each movement.

“May I touch your yoni? ” he asked quietly. Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes. Fingers entered me, slick with massage oil. He massaged me slowly and gently, inside and out, as if his hands had known me forever. He and I were the ocean—timeless, our rhythm primordial and certain.

I gave myself up to Sunyata’s expert hands, and the ocean soared and roared in crashing waves of pleasure. Wild sensations, the culmination of a year and a half of grief and longing. I laughed. I cried. I laughed again.

His massage turned quiet again, relaxing me after my wild ride. As he stroked me, my arousal started to rise again. Though in “normal” life, one orgasm is absolutely fulfilling and plenty for me, his hands responded to my surge and—more quickly this time—the waves crashed again.

“You must love your job,” I mumbled to Sunyata as I quieted finally.

“I love my job,” he said. I pictured him smiling but I didn’t manage to open my eyes to find out.

My birthday erotic massage from a gentle stranger changed something in me. It showed me that I was still a responsive, fully sexual woman, getting ready to emerge from the cocoon of mourning into reexperiencing life. I realized that one big reason I ended up on Sunyata’s massage table was so that I could get ready to reenter the world.

Sometimes Robert seems to talk to me. I ask him, “Are you really talking to me, or am I making this up?” and he replies, “It doesn’t matter.” As I approach the third anniversary of his death, I receive this message as clearly as if his voice utters it:

Baby, when I was alive I wanted you all to myself. I needed reassurance that in loving you so much I wasn’t risking losing myself by losing you. I wasn’t sure I could give you enough to make you happy.

I can’t make you happy now. I can’t hold you except in your memory and sometimes in dreams.

You don’t need to ask my permission to live your life fully and zestfully. Or to share that love and lust in you with another.

You have so much life in you, sweetheart, so much love to give.

Give it.

If you need my blessing, you have it.

Love always,

Robert

Although I still miss Robert every time I breathe in or out, I know I’ll have a lover again, and it will be good. I know I can’t replace the love I shared with Robert and I’m not looking for that—but I do need to stay vibrant and alive. Nurturing my sexual self is a part of being fully alive that I will embrace.

Latina Glitter

Rachel Rabbit White

The stars of the oldest Latino drag show in the United States admit that the term
drag
is a bit of a misnomer for their show—because the queens of this stage are not the usual men in drag you expect to find but male-to-female transgender performers.

Ketty Teanga is high femme. It was clear from the time she was nine years old, trotting in her mom’s heels. But it wasn’t until age 15 that she decided to embrace being a woman. Ketty was still living as a man, but started dancing in a drag show. It was the 1960s in Puerto Rico. “The shows were spectacular, very famous. But back then it was not femme, you had to take off your wig at the end of the show to prove you were a man.” The climate was rough: “In Puerto Rico, the police would stop you if you were in drag. We would get out at four a.m. from a show, in street clothes, but they would press a napkin on our face to see if we had on makeup. If we did, they would arrest us right there.”

Hers is a story we don’t often see in the media. When trans people do get a rare spotlight, it’s often the stories of white trans people. Richard Rodriguez, Associate Professor in the Latina/ Latino Studies program at the University of Illinois, explains, “As anyone who grew up in a Latino community will tell you, there are always LGBT people around. Sometimes they are accepted and sometimes they aren’t. What I find, however, is that LGBT Latinas and Latinos may find more acceptance among Latinos than white queers.”

Decades later, Teanga is still a (transgender) drag performer. Her home is covered in glittering dresses, glossy photographs, and LGBT awards. Teanga started what is known as the oldest Latino drag show in the country, at La Cueva in Chicago, where only Spanish is spoken. But it’s not a “drag show” in the usual sense—all the performers are MTF transgender women. While Teanga no longer performs, she can still be seen at the bar 4:00 a.m., watching the new crop of glitter y performers. “I am gonna die in the show. That’s my life,” she says, her voice hoarse.

While so much has changed since Teanga’s day, when each performer tells her story, the themes are similar to Teanga’s. “I would play with my sister in Mexico. We played tea party and made cookies with sugar, pretending to be famous sisters and artists. My mom would get mad because I would wear her dresses. That’s how my life started, my different life,” says Vanessa. She writhes around in skimpy dresses onstage, but offstage she is soft-spoken. A fellow performer, Diana, who is animated, with red-streaked hair, agrees. “It never starts as anything sexual, because as a kid that doesn’t make sense. You just know you like girl things, and that you are different.”

It was in the 70s, in New York City, that Teanga started transitioning—taking hormones. “Back then, you could do your transition and take hormones, but you still had to dress like a man. Only on the weekends could you be a woman—and this is in New York, not even Puerto Rico!”

Other things have changed, too. On a slow snowy night at La Cueva, two lesbian couples arrive just after midnight to cuddle at dark tables while gay men slow-dance under the disco ball. At the bar, there are a few solo Mexican cowboys. But in the 80s when the show started, it wasn’t as LGBT friendly.

“Now it is all gay and lesbian. In my day, it was straight men who came,” says Teanga, a little longingly. “I was seen as a woman, so straight men came.” It sounds sort of progressive, but the transphobia was also much higher. “There were a lot of gangsters—they’d throw bottles and shoot at us with BB guns. You had to park your car and run inside,” she says. According to the manager, Ruben Lechuga, the bar itself was feistier, with fewer bouncers and more fights.

Working at La Cueva makes the performers visible and therefore vulnerable. But the bar is one place offering Latina transwomen work—which can be hard to come by. “I’ve been working for La Cueva for nine years and I never before worked doing what I do now. I worked in other places like restaurants and temp office jobs. But I was frowned upon for applying with a male name but wanting to be a woman. They have issues with you going to the women’s bathroom, things like that,” Paula, a petite performer with chiseled features, says.

Of course, transphobia is not limited to Latina transwomen, but it can be more intense for them. Rodriguez says, “Transphobia has to an overwhelming degree curtailed the employment opportunities of transgender individuals. Latina transwomen, like African American transwomen, are also subject to racism. But when you add language to the mix, Latina transwomen may find it increasingly difficult to find work.”

Regardless of the language barrier—which is significant, as the performers only speak Spanish—the United States is where these women can find jobs. “Before this, I worked out in the fields in Mexico, and I always dreamed about working in a place doing what I do now,” Vanessa says. Diana explains it as feeling more safe. “I feel gays are more understood here.” Mexico City may have legalized gay marriage, but Vanessa and Paula assert that homophobia within the community remains. It seems that as gay issues get press, this tension grows. “In Mexico they changed the law to where gay marriages are allowed, but they will still call you out on the street or yell dirty things, much worse than here,” says Paula.

Rodriguez sees it as a larger problem. “While educating people on transgender lives is key, I also believe there must be a more concerted effort by queers and straight allies alike to advocate for rights and fair treatment for transgender people. Unfortunately middle-class, privileged issues like gay marriage continue to overshadow the blatant racial and economic discrepancies faced by those purportedly accounted for in the LGBT community,” he says.

But in her 50 years of being out as transgender, Teanga has seen a change in the attitudes of the Latino community toward gays. “Latinos are just becoming more positive and proud of gays, but only somewhat of transgendered people.”

Rodriguez agrees. “I’m inclined to say the Latino community has become more gay—accepting—but this suggests that Latinos have always been homophobic. This is not necessarily true. While Latino religious and cultural values often stand at odds with homosexuality, many Latino families have accepted LGBT members. We are witnessing more Latino LGBT media representations (Ricky Martin, for example) that are, fortunately, raising awareness and igniting conversation about homosexuality in the Latino community.”

When I talk to the performers, the importance of their work comes back to community. “We are all Latinos here. You can make friends here, talk, and overall have a good time,” Diana says. “This is a place that opens its doors to the Latino gay community as well as anyone.”

Teanga pinpoints the moment when things began to change for her, and by extension for all trans performers. “So, the saxophone was playing. And I started to take off my clothes. And my body was curvy from the hormones. That is when the shows changed. It became about femme, not men in drag.”

Dating with an STD

Lynn Harris

Susie Carrillo was 21 years old and a mother of two young children when an abnormal Pap smear yielded a triple-whammy nightmare. She was shocked not only by a diagnosis of high-grade cervical dysplasia—a serious precancerous condition—but also by its apparent cause: human papillomavirus (HPV), a sexually transmitted infection, or STI, more commonly known as STD, for sexually transmitted disease. A doctor had found it two years earlier but had largely dismissed it, saying, eh, it’ll probably clear up on its own. With no warnings about the risks of cancer, or transmission, Carrillo says she “ just didn’t think about it” and told no one. And that’s what led, in part, to the third and perhaps biggest whammy of all: her husband’s reaction to the cause of her cancer. “He turned it into hell for me. He demanded to know how many people I’d slept with, accused me of cheating, and called me a slut,” she says. Even though Carrillo had never strayed—she believes she contracted HPV from a premarriage ex—her husband’s abusive words began to infect her, too. “I started to wonder if maybe it
was
my fault,” she says. Ashamed and embarrassed, she went through cancer treatment alone.

Thankfully, Carrillo was eventually cured: of both her cancer and her self-blame. She ultimately divorced her husband, found support online, and learned, as she says, that she has “nothing to be ashamed about.” But even with its happy ending, her story reveals a troubling reality: While STIs have reached pandemic proportions, the stigma surrounding them remains ugly—perhaps especially for women.

“You cannot get through a season of
Jersey Shore
or
The Real World
without an STI joke implying that the person accused of having one is skanky and slutty, and saying ‘Ooh, watch out, you might catch something,’” says Adina Nack PhD, a medical sociologist specializing in sexual health and author of
Damaged Goods? Women Living with Incurable Sexually Transmitted Diseases
. “And that person they’re talking about is almost always a woman. There’s a serious misconception that you have to be promiscuous in order to contract an STI, and while men in our culture are rewarded for being sexually active, women are judged.” (Nack cites one woman in her practice who’d never even had sex, but who contracted an STI while—successfully—fighting off a rapist. Even she said, “I feel like a slut.”)

To be sure, STIs and their attendant stigmas are (as I’ve written elsewhere) no picnic for men, either. But their impact appears to be different, in certain ways, for women. Among the hundreds of people with STIs Nack has interviewed, she says, men tend to be more concerned about medical realities—the best treatment, the best protection for partners—while women focus on much broader, and harsher, implications that strike at the very core of their sexual selves: “Will I be rejected as ‘damaged goods’? ” “Are my dreams for sex, love and happiness over?”

This is ironic, considering that STIs are now so strikingly common that, as Nack says, “you should go out into the dating world assuming that the person you’re with has already contracted something, even though they may not know it. Even if someone says, ‘I’m clean—I’ve been tested for everything,’ they’re either ignorant or lying, because we don’t even have definitive tests for everything.” STIs are often asymptomatic and frequently go undiagnosed. The CDC estimates that nearly 19 million new infections occur each year. At least
half
of the sexually active population will contract HPV at some point; 45 percent of women 20 to 24 have it already. It’s so prevalent, in fact, that the medical community considers HPV infection a virtual marker for having had sex at all. One in five adults, whether they know it or not, has herpes right now. In other words, statistically, your date is more likely to carry a sexually transmitted infection than to share your astrological sign.