Reunited and Confronted

"I really like your boyfriend. He seems nice."
She sips her mimosa lightly with tightly pursed lips.

I smile and gulp my coffee as butterflies fill my stomach.
"Yeah. He's pretty great," I say, dreamily. I'm awash in my affections for a moment before I snap back to the present. "I mean, we haven't been together for very long, but we're having a blast."

"You've had quite a lot of boyfriends, haven't you?" Her nonchalant tone and dainty British accent almost conceal the pointed curiosity behind her probing.

I feel my entire body flush and instantly start to sweat. "Yes. As a matter of fact I have." Her question was bold for someone I haven't seen in six years. "What are you getting at?"

"Oh I didn't mean it like that, I just mean..."

Yeah. What do you mean.

She somewhat stutters, "I wasn't trying to shame you or anything. I just remember that back in the day, you were more described as... whats the word? I don't know how to say it."

Without emotion I offer the term, "Polyamorous Pansexual?"

"Yes! Something like that, anyway. You had this aura around you... like you were too cool to approach but it was also like a vortex that people would fall in and never escape."

It seemed like a somewhat sinister description, however she beamed in wonder and delight at being able to remind me of the personal power I once wielded.

Now I take a gulp of my mimosa. "Well, at least I used to be 'cool.'"

"If I could count the people who feel into your votex and never to recover... Danny tried to kill himself when you left him, remember? And Marc had it bad as well. And If I recall --"

"Ok, yeah, I guess I was somewhat of a heartbreaker back then." I wasn't really enjoying these tales of emotional obliteration that I had left in my wake. And no, I hadn't remembered these ugly details.

"Uh, saying that you were a 'heartbreaker' is such an understatement." She shifted nervously. "But what I was getting at was that you used to be with ... all kinds of people. Then something happened and you seem to be mostly interested in men." Cue nervous laughter.

Oh the boxes I get put in.
"I recently got my heart torn out by a lady, so. I'm glad to have gotten over that and now I can move on with my life."

She looked surprised. I hadn't really blasted what happened on social media, so I suppose in that sense it didn't really happen (if not in front of all eyes). "What happened?"

______________________

I was on one knee behind her in the kitchen. She wouldn't stop washing dishes, ever the excellent home-maker. She reflected, whilst rinsing and drying, that ever day we spent together was the best day she'd ever had. I gently took her hand when it became available and she turned around to find me there, looking up at her. 

"What are you doing?" She looked alarmed. 

"It can still be the best day, every day." And then I proposed we get married. 

She turned away back to the dishes, angry. "I can't believe you would do that."

"Why not? We're insane for each other. I love you."

"You think I'd marry for a green card?!" She whipped her body back towards me, and her eyes were livid. 

"No! No, sweetheart it's not like that. I want to marry you for you. And yes, I want you to be able to stay here with me, if that's what you want, and take care of you." And I really did mean that. 

Despite my sincerity, I lost the discussion. Not because she didn't say yes, but because I had embarrassed and upset her. She was not going to stay, and she likely thought that I was insane or worse, disingenuous. 

She left and days, weeks, months passed. I cried a lot thinking of her. I begged her to come back. I helplessly watched her fall into a pit of despair and drown in booze. She insisted during the day that she was happy, that I should be more supportive. But once night fell, there was a lot of sturm und drang in her phone calls and messages, and she drank like it was an olympic sport. Finally, the calls stopped coming. The last message from her I received was a post in the mail, containing a picture of her dancing. There was no return address. 

Over the months, I stopped playing guitar. One of my favorite songs to play only reminded me of her, and inevitably whilst playing it, the lyrics would become choked in tears. I lovingly put away things that reminded me of her. One day, it stopped stinging so badly. I stopped thinking of her all the time -- things she would like, how I could surprise her if she was here, our inside jokes -- and I even was able to get drunk without getting sad about her. And finally, I was able to move on. 

___________________

"Honestly, love, it sounds like you're really better off. It seems like she was a whole lot of drama." 

I glance at her sideways for this assessment. She doesn't know everything. It's impossible to relay the details of something so complicated, amazing, and heartbreaking with any accuracy in a short conversation. But with a sigh, I decide it's best for me to accept this judgement as having truth to it. What's the point in fighting it, when I've moved on? Formerly described 'Polyamorous Pansexual' little ole me was in a bonafide monogamous relationship with a straight man. And despite the contrasting comparisons of this notion with a portrait of who I have been in the past, I feel just fine. 

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.

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.

Enterprising on Bigotry

One night recently I was out at Sweetie's venue. He zipped around the tiny place, weaving between tables, shaking hands and distributing drinks -- the man works hard. As I was chatting with some girls at the bar, I lost focus staring into the crowd: many people of different genders with the same haircut... just like San Francisco, I thought. But before long, the girls pulled me back into reality, and I heard my thoughts narrate themselves in surprise.
"Wait a second..."
It had suddenly dawned on me that I was being hit on my a small mob of Turkish lesbians.
"...Huh."
I hadn't expected that in this part of the world.

It was late in the night, early in the morning when Sweetie and I were arm and arm with his best friend: a middle aged homosexual Mexican-American expat with a strange sense of humor and a dehabilitating love for cats. As we stumbled down the street towards Cihangir, we entered a sea of young men loitering outside of a club.

MexEx could hardly contain himself: "Look at all these cute boys..." He purred, "Let's go in."

"Are you serious, man?" Sweetie whispered under a tense smile. "We need to leave this place."

"Just for a minute," he bargained. "Your girl wants to go in, too." 

"No... you don't understand. This isn't just a bar," explained Sweetie.
It was a meat market for transvestite hookers.

My elbows were being pulled in both directions. MexEx and Sweetie hissed at each other and the crowds of young men eyed us as they argued.

MexEx gave up on his physical approach. His next tactic, one particularly deadly to Turks, was social pressure. He broke away from us and sauntered toward a group of the young men. He inquired, "Hey boys, how is it in there?" in his most flirtatious tone.

Some of them shook their heads and muttered something incomprehensible. 

"They said not to go in. That it's a gay place," Sweetie explained.

MexEx was delighted: young men in closeted denial are his target sexual prey. He approached them lecherously. "Would you like your first homosexual experience?"
MexEx waved Sweetie over to translate, much to his chagrin. 

I hung back and watched the people come and go from the place. Gaggles of glittering and overdressed, but beautiful women floated down the street into the club ("Those aren't natural women, honey") and occasionally one would emerge, dragged eagerly by the hand of a hurried man.

"What are these guys doing outside?" I asked Sweetie. 

"They're deciding whether or not to go in. I think they want to, but they feel shame."
MexEx licked his lips. "Maybe they too are for hire..."

Eventually we left, Sweetie's persistent reminders of the dangers hanging around that area of Taxsim at nearly 5am having overcome my curiosity and MexEx's erection. 

"I've been there once before, and it was a crazy place" MexEx explained, "No one was dancing except the trannies. The guys were all at one end of the bar, drinking, and eventually they walked up to one, took her by the hand, and left. That's it... It. Was. Fascinating! They just chose, and left."

At first I was surprised that such a place could exist in Turkey, but I was quickly reminded of the cultural differences which actually allow such situations to flourish

"It's not gay if you're on top."

I expected this point of view to be held by bigoted rednecks within my own country, but I had hardly considered its global acceptance. However, I had noticed that there are a lot of transvestite hookers in my neighborhood -- working the streets or calling to men from upper story windows, just like the Tenderloin ladies I'm familiar with. I suppose that in homophobic culture, their business thrives off of this idea: preserved heterosexuality of the active. 

Sweetie last week had been explaining to me the legal ramifications of this concept. 

If one is a gay man who would like to protest his mandatory military service citing homosexuality, not only is he required to provide the government with photographic evidence of homosexual activities, he must be the "passive," "receiving," or "bottom" party in said photos. In addition, he must go to a military doctor every six months to prove with physical evidence the veracity of his orientation. I can only imagine the horror of the experience: prostrated and subject to prejudiced doctors looking for or incurring anal fissures. Perhaps they conduct more abusive tests. After all, rape isn't gay if you're on top.

If all of this "evidence" fails to convince and he has to serve his military service anyway, a likely fate is for him to be beaten to death behind closed doors and listed publicly as a "suicide," a fate shared by Kurds, Armenians, and other marginalized groups of the Turkish population facing intolerance. 

And still, I'm acquainted with far more out gay and lesbian individuals here in Istanbul than in the rainbow flag-waving region from which I harken. Beautiful tranny sex-workers are a part of my neighborhood landscape and I've been frequenting LGBT community events. More investigation is needed, but so far it has been wondrous marveling both at the backwards and forwards nature of sexual orientation-related progressiveness in this place.

For more interesting observations on various treatments of sexuality in Turkey and other parts of the world, check out the aggregate post Fascinating Reads: Sexuality in the World. 
Read the latest from Seduce and Confuse and share it with your friends or enemies.