Sexuality in the World [Aggregate]

Things are going well for me these days. Though I fly home in less than a week, I'm reminding myself that the adventure never ends. I'm gearing up for excitement that the summer brings, such as presenting at San Francisco's polyamory conference Open SF, as well as wrapping up here in Istanbul and reflecting on my experiences over the last three months. My mind is buzzing.

In the meantime as I collect my thoughts, there are a number of fascinating reads I've come across that I find to be worth sharing: some of them illustrate more objectively what I've already written about quite experientially, and others bring to light phenomena of sexuality in a world view that shouldn't go unconsidered. Context is everything!

Articles are arranged loosely by these categories:
Gay Rights in Military, Perverse World History, Women in North America, and International Gender-fuck.

Distance: Emotional Problems of Nomadism

"You are falling in love, sweetie-heart, this is the issue."
Maybe Moody Poland is right.
"I can see on your face. But why you want to make so much problem for yourself with this?"

I take a gulp of my beer and reflect. A few more gulps and the beer is gone.
"Görüşürüz." / "See you later."

One long sigh carries me on my walk to Sweetie's. I feel powerless against his invitation. When we make love, he brings me closer to god. When we fuck, he reaches so far inside of me that he actually fucks the organ of my heart. I writhe, moan, and scream, high on his drug, the most powerful visceral pleasure I have known.

But our conversations are frustrating. He says things like, "Of course I can't be your friend." Once I asked him why not, to which he quizzically responded, "Because I'm in love with you," with an implied "obviously" at the end. Statements like these are testaments to our future: either he'll hug me so close I can't breathe or push me so far I can't see him anymore. There is no careful in-between -- no part of our relationship is conducted without fervency.

_______________________________

I shouldn't be surprised that Sweetie has been pushing me away. He's been standing me up, leaving me waiting, doling out a chilly minimum of human acknowledgement. Predictable as this was, of course it hurts to see him suddenly act this way. It's as if someone has flipped a switch in his heart, but I don't wonder why.

The reality that I will leave has finally sunk in. When he convinced me to extend my stay, he had hoped I would get a residency visa. Maybe I was lazy, or maybe I just didn't want to, but regardless, I didn't even apply. A tourist visa only allows 90 out of 180 days in Turkey. My time is nearly up and now that my departure date is two weeks away, he's realized that keeping me close is futile: I'm leaving him, as he puts it. True, I'm not staying to meet his parents, decorate a house, or have his babies, not this time around. He probably thinks that I won't come back, or maybe that it won't matter by the time I do. And so the fire that once burned white-hot is now cold and sooty.

Traveling as much as I do, and for the extended periods of time that I prefer, I occasionally see this kind of emotional response. When I'm about to leave a place, the people who have held me the closest are sometimes the ones who quickly erect barriers and become the most distanced. They're trying to protect their emotional well-being, or they don't know how to express their hurt frustration that I'm abandoning them, or maybe they don't consciously realize their motivations, which I understand. However, it hurts me too. It's one aspect of lengthy international travel that I don't enjoy, being a puck on an emotional shuffleboard. But I'm not made out of hard plastic, I'm an organism. I'm beginning to trail a little blood.

Slut Shaming

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Bisexual Women and Cattle Fetish

Istanbul: the stench of sizzling rotisserie intestine called kokoreç forces its way up my nostrils just as I lock eyes with a prostitute. She's draped herself on a wall by a dumpster, bored and smoking a cigarette to pass the time -- I'm grateful for the smoke's pollution as it does its best to mask the overwhelming scents coming from the buffet of hot flesh on offer in Tarlabaşi. Home.

Sparky and I power athletically down the street as she smokes her last and rants impassioned about the government's taxation of cigarettes:

"Those fucking bureaucratic assholes... how can those fuckers look themselves in the mirror? Their dicks are covered in prostitutes and their wives are covered in veils."

I rented her apartment for the first month I was in Istanbul, that's how we had met. Foucault, writings about sex and addiction, and Indie-Art House DVDs were on the selves, art with a disturbing rawness graced the walls, the kitchen was stocked, I immediately felt at home in her space. When she came back from her annual hibernation / artistic pilgrimage in Canada (not unlike my time in Turkey), we met in person and discovered we were kindred spirits. We've been close since. She hooked me up with a room next door with Hot Chip, making us both friends and neighbors.

"I had never taken a shit that smelled so good, and so I had to ask myself: why?! Why did it smell so good? Tropical, even."

The thing about Sparky is that she is fascinating. I think most people are interesting, but she is fascinating. She has a power about her and a way of story telling that is all-engrossing, her energy is intoxicating.

"It turns out that we had been using coconut butter as lube. That explained everything."

She captivates a room with her hijink-riddled stories of misbehavior -- best that they should hear it. Let them live vicariously.

"So on Christmas I took it up the ass with greasy, chunky, coconut cream. Which brings me to my point: no one, I mean no one, can tell me that I am not a giving lover."

The first time I heard the story of surprise coconut lube, we were somewhere on the Asian continent. She was very excited about its telling and she often rested her head on my shoulder. Still, despite her marked increase of affection and enthusiasm, I didn't realize she was rolling. The second time, we were at a cafe club that looked like Barbie's psyche and we were both rolling. It looked as though teenagers had barfed pink glitter on the walls. We laughed a lot.

Sparky identifies as being bisexual, an artist, Turkish, but also very North American, having spent of her adolescent and young adult life in Canada. She has Pan-esque short, asymmetrical, magenta hair, a plethora of piercings, and a shaved pussy. She tastes amazing. When she's intimately aroused, a single exhale from her lips is enough to send shivers emanating from my root up my spine. She wears green eyeliner and celebrates in her distinctively deep, gruff voice. When she speaks in Turkish, the sound is rough like shark's skin -- like The Swiss Family Robinson, I want to climb a tree with her language on my thighs.

"So this Sultan, Osman... I can't remember which, Osman Whatever II, had his vizier bring him women as his lokum, yani, his little treat, whatever, that part is normal, but he made him bring fat women, the fatter the better, then after fucking them he would have them killed as he watched. Fucked up, eh? He wanted his women to be like cattle, so fat they looked like cattle, then killed like cattle, he insisted on it." 

"That's some fucked up snuff shit right there." 

"Cattle fetish, man!" 

Loud rants like these in public places are an example of many reminders that Istanbul is not Cairo. Thank God, il humdulilah. In this city, Sparky and I can go to LGBT events and get wasted without fearing for our lives. We dance together, gyrating closely to industrial electro music, and it happens to not be the most dramatic thing in the room. We end up in drunken strip tease induced group sex, and it feels natural. We don't have to stress ourselves out about it. But that last part, the ease of interaction, maybe has less to do with the environment and more to do with the individuals.

In California, my dear friend Texas had made somewhat of a habit of seducing me when she was intoxicated (and that she frequently was). I remember her Russian Hill apartment on the night of her birthday, an evening she had fiercely declared as LADIES NIGHT: she was prone on her couch and I was eating her, fingering her as she tried to silence her moans for the sake of her guests asleep in the next room. But it was her birthday, I had to do what she wanted. Though I had baked her a cake, I owed the pleasure to her, she said. She demanded an orgasm by my tongue, and she felt that due to it being the anniversary of her birth, she deserved it -- a reward for living as long as 24 years on this earth. That night a group of ten of us or so had gotten all dolled up in tight, short, glistening tubes of dresses, our unattainable bitch costumes, and we traveled in a pack. Now these slut suits were pushed up and pulled awry, she was begging for me to make her cum. Unlike my girl friend in high school, she clearly wasn't playing in an act to colloquially claim to experience or to arouse cocks inserting themselves in fantasy. This was her fantasy. She begged, and begged, until she came in my mouth.

She was always with some guy and she never considered herself to be bisexual. The only other sexual encounter with a woman that she had told me about was a steamy but abbreviated make-out session on a dance floor in Italy. Perhaps this gap in her self-perception and her inhibited desire, desire such as displayed on that moonlit couch and so many other grimy San Francisco street-side back drops, is what inspired her to push me away when she entered the corporate world of Silicon Valley, working at Google or YouTube or wherever. Perhaps, though we had been best friends for many years, perhaps I didn't fit in the portrait she held in her mind of her adulthood. Perhaps she suddenly needed to leave that phase of experimentation behind her, juvenile as it was, pissing in the face of her straight privilege and aspirations of "normalcy". I wasn't asking her to be with me, in fact I didn't want that, she is nothing close to polyamorous and we both love dick too much to give up. I was happy to please her physically and to be socially as we had always been, but now it is occurring to me for the first time that perhaps this was in itself the problem. Did she want more?

Whatever the problem, she created a seemingly insurmountable distance between us, characterized by an extremely frustrating absence of communication of any kind. Torturing as this silence seems, it's the best show of my love for her that I can offer by allowing the space for as long as she needs. If she feels like telling me about it one day, I'll gladly listen.

When I was in college, sexuality columnist Dan Savage from Seattle's publication The Stranger treated the student body to an interactive lecture. While it was mostly give-and-take, he stated at least one thing quite definitively that has since stuck with me: bisexuals don't exist. Men are either gay or straight -- if they say they are bi, they are simply doing their best to adjust to the truth -- and women's sexualities are so fluid that it's pointless to label their preferences at any given time as if they will be sustained for a lifetime. By the way, Dan Savage has since written columns revising his previously stated opinion on bisexuality, making a little more effort these days to tread lightly on the eggshell egos of the community and fight personal accusations of bi-phobia. Regardless of his current stance, at the time he brought to light for me the pressure to identify oneself with a sort of inferred judgement, even or especially within the LGBT community. Sometimes it seems to come down to the following questions:
"Do you qualify for straight privilege?"
Not quite.
"Do you qualify for homosexual acceptance?"
Not quite.
"Why are you so insistent on being so fucking difficult?"

I wonder if not quite being able to put a finger on the fluidity of female sexuality actually makes it easier for someone like me to accept, while this invisible pill is nearly impossible for someone like Texas to swallow.

Doesn't bother Sparky. And this isn't the first time I've been "with" a female in an Islamic country. Seems funny to me, somehow, but perhaps I shouldn't judge a country by its Qur'an.

For more antics with Sparky, check out the post Hunting Bambi. 
Curious about LGBT in Turkey? Read THIS. 
Find the latest from Seduce and Confuse HERE.

Gypsy Love Curse

Istanbul: A persistently lonely and desperate feline screech sneaks beyond the feeble barrier of my window pane. It disturbs my slumber and I groan, turn over. It's 6:30 PM and still I can't pull myself out of bed. I get so disappointed at moments like these, but on the bright side, I tell myself, when I move back to the other side of the world maybe I'll be a naturally early riser. Maybe I'll exercise more, I certainly could use the endorphin kick... thinking this, I hear myself grunt at the preposterous notion of running through these torn and crumbling streets.
Three months is a long time.

My whole house is on an insanely erratic yet surprisingly synchronized schedule. One day we'll wake at 9:30 PM, groaning our morning greetings, the next we'll be up at the the crack of dawn mopping the floors cheerfully. We call it "social jet lag". It's been a couple weeks since I've moved out of Sweetie's apartment and into a ground level flat in the slums, populated by outcasts, freaks, and all of Istanbul's cats moaning in heat, right where I belong.

I like this place. It's got all the decadent charm of the ghetto. I like my house mates. They are a Turkish electronic musician who aspires to be the next Hot Chip and his moody Polish girlfriend. We're all completely broke, just managing, subsisting mostly on the nutrition of beer and Cha Cha -- a fire water moonshine from Georgia, the country, that will disinfect your intestines as it burns a hole right through them. Our neighbors are two ladies who have become good friends of mine, a Turkish visual artist who goes by Sparky and a sharp-witted Jewish pansexual writer from San Francisco. Our neighborhood, despite being as terrifying as it is with dog fights, drug dealers, and open crime, it's home, and whether or not I should, I feel comfortable. All in all, I'm happy that I moved out of Sweetie's.

One night a bunch of guys were sitting around, drinking beer, asking of each other the greater questions in life.
"So, when you use the bidet, do you ever, you know... finger your asshole a little?"
"I dunno man, sometimes it just slips in there."
"Yeah, I mean... It's good to be extra clean. In that area especially."

Sweetie came over to check on me in my new surroundings and was hardly amused.
"What the fuck are these guys?"
"Chello, I am here too, don't forget," said Moody Poland. Her tiny arms were crossed over her chest  as she stared at him disapprovingly. She usually has a focused, intense, crazed look about her that makes me wonder if they cannibalize where she comes from (my experience of Eastern Europeans is that they are insane), and this moment was no exception.

As a dark skinned man and a business owner in a country quickly developing beyond its means, Sweetie is no stranger to hostile energy and so he chose to ignore her. Though there is a side of him comfortable with dealing with aggressors, incurring violence, and making death threats, he put on his syrupy sweet voice for me: "Tatlim, come home with me and drink tea and let me sleep on your knees..."

Given the way we had broken up, I didn't feel that I owed him anything. "I'm happy here. Why don't you stay and have some Cha Cha?"
He reluctantly accepted the shot Hot Chip's forceful hospitality pressured him into then left without saying a word.
After the slam of the door, Moody Poland tsk'd three times. "Such dramatic. You're better without it, honestly."

All the same, I was sad to see him go like that. His smell and the kiss lingering on my neck were a heady perfume and a burning souvenir. A few shots of Cha Cha, however, and my senses faded.

Igor, Conquerer of my Heart

My birthday is coming up next month, as is my glorious return Stateside.

"I had an idea for your party, but I'm not sure you'll be into it."
"Lay it on me."
"Well, you know, it would just be a good party. Good music, some delish food, good company, obviously... but while all this is going on, I was thinking you would actually be bound in another room for the pleasure of the guests to use. Gang-rape style."

The following are 5 points on why I love my boyfriend.