spandex & lucite shoes: part 27, come out, come out, whoever i am

This is the post I was writing when my computer had a little epileptic fit. Now that it has been brought back from its comatose state, I wanted to finish it... It's another episode of my stripmemoirs. You can get caught up here, or you can just sit down and slide in mid-stream...it's your choice.

Being a stripper is a lot like being a writer—both professions require you to know your audience well enough to keep them interested as you slowly reveal some body of work. Being a sex writer is almost exactly like being a stripper. Though as of yet it’s a lot less high paying. And my feet really don’t hurt at all.

Though other parts of me do. But I digress.

A sex writer, like a stripper, has a choice to make about identity. Most other occupations don’t offer forth the frothy cocktail of puritan shame and prurient interest that the occupations of stripper and the sex writer bear on their ample bosoms. You tell someone that you stripped, and you see this brief discomposing flicker, this momentary lapse when that person tries successfully or not to recompose facial features into a semblance of polite interest.

“Really,” they say and then usually falter.

You have a choice as a stripper to come out to your friends and family. You have a choice as a sex writer too, especially when you’re the not-quite-as-of-yet-published sort that I am. I do, of course, have aims to publish. I do, of course, have a book or several in me, and I do, of course, want to publish them and get all the miniscule glories attendant with seeing my name in print.

You don’t know it, my name. Trust me: it looks good in print.

And this beginning may seem tangential to my strippy narrative, but trust me it is not. It runs a big thick swath down my CeeCee self because the question became, as I was stripping, who I was, who CeeCee was, and how to keep these two not so disparate (though sometimes desperate) lives from blurring like wet watercolors.

I don’t keep my own secrets well. If my secret is as much someone else’s as it is mine, I respect that privacy and don’t tell. But if it is mine and mine alone, then I do. If it rests in the grey area of the Venn diagram between thine and mine, then sometimes I write about it.

And sometimes I don’t.

But when I was stripping, I constantly assessed whom I told. Whom I could tell and why I would. And equally from whom I had to guard this secret. Sometimes I found myself shamed, like when I brought my Flashworn Lucite shoes to the cobbler to have him resole them. He would look at me, my scuffed and stinky white platform in the curve of his brown palm, and our eyes would meet and I would see that he knew. I could see him imagining me naked, which he probably would have done anyway, just without the obligatory pole and flashing lights.

Sometimes, like right after I had my boobs done, people would look at me and try to place the difference, or having placied it, try to give it context. Other times, people would notice my year-round tan, my French-manicures, my sheet of blonde hair and they knew. They just knew. Usually these people had stripexperience themselves. Sometimes they just guessed well.

And I was bursting to tell. I had this huge secret in the straight world and all I wanted to do was to let it ripen and burst open like a blackberry in the sun. I wanted to just let the secret out into the air and see what happened because it was so much goddammed work to hold it in my size 6 body.

I went to college at day and I stripped at night. And while I was at school I saw these things I read through a stripper’s eyes. I read Yeats and saw the foul rag and boneshop of my heart played out in a split screen of some dusty Irish pawnshop and some scruffy New York pornshop. I read Michel Foucault and saw my nightlife of sexwork expressed in my daytime intellectual textual politics.

I went to work at night and reveled in my putting my feminist praxis into practice. Here I was, I thought, making the patriarchal system work for me. I was the one in power, I told myself as I smiled and swiveled in 6” heels, holding my garter out for the drunken patriarchs. I was liberated in my own brand of do-me feminism, I told myself while counting my twenties in my cab ride home at four in the morning.

I tried to both meld my two worlds and to keep them separated.  Like the famous Einstein quote about simultaeously keeping peace and preparing for war, these two acts were at cross-purposes.

I stripped a year before going to school. I stripped my final year of college, the year between college and grad school, and the first two years of graduate school. I spent the vast majority of those years not telling anyone but my closest friends and my boyfriend, if I had one, what I did. And I cannot begin to tell you how much that hurt.

I remember in this undergrad writing class I took with Susan Cheever, she had us write a five-sentence paragraph that followed this paradigm: simple sentence; compound or complex sentence; compound-complex sentence; compound or complex sentence: simple sentence.

I don’t remember exactly what I wrote, but it went something like this: I am a stripper. I go to school every morning after working until 4:00 a.m. the night before. I don’t tell anyone what I do, for it is hard for most to understand and to see me the way they did before they knew. I work very hard and I am very tired. I love it all.

And then I asked her not to read it aloud. She didn’t, but she, too, never looked at me quite the same way again.

Dancing, of course, I had a separate name, a bogus identity, a sham history. It didn’t bother me to not tell those people who I was and what I did, but it was hard to keep my fake life from blending in whirly bits into my real life.

Especially when I was home in Vermont. I’m not really sure what my burning impetus was for telling my mom, but I had it. It had a big old fire in my belly and I had to had to had to tell. I had to. Part of it, I’m sure, was my desperate loneliness.

I haven’t really gotten into it here, yet, though I’ve tiptoed around it, but here’s the simple fact: I spent two ten-month consecutive periods without having sex. And while a lot of my pain came from the loss of the sex, which really requires its own writing, the lion’s share just came from being alone so much of the time.

Every Sunday, especially during my first year in grad school, I spent sitting on my couch, weeping. Every Sunday my mom would call, and every Sunday I would feel this crashing sense of utter abandonment. And eventually, the crash of the loneliness, the weight of the conflict, and that burning impetus conspired to make me come out to my mom.

I remember I was sitting on a stool in my family’s kitchen. I sort of took a deep breath and dove into the narrative.

I’m not a waitress, I told my mother. I’m a stripper. I’ve been doing it for four years, I told her. I work at FlashDancers, I told her. They treat me well, I said.

“Does it make you feel badly about yourself?” She asked.

No, I told her.

“Do you feel safe doing it?” She asked.

Yes, I told her.

She stood, clearly considering all that I’d told her. “I’d always wondered where you got the money,” she said, sizing me up. “And as long as you feel ok doing it, I guess it’s ok with me.” She paused. “There will always be poor women and men needing some place to go and look, so it looks like every one comes out ahead,” she said and went back to washing the dishes or whatever it was she was doing.

We did speak of it again, the stripping. When Striptease, the Demi Moore movie, came out, my mom called me.

“I was thinking,” she said, “Given that so many men want to cheat and the fear of AIDS, I guess what you’re doing is giving these people a safe environment for working out their fantasies. It’s a social service, really.”

That’s right, Mom, I responded. I’m a social worker.

But now that the stripping is all said and done and so solidly in the then, I know that I wasn’t really honest, if not with her, at least with myself. It did hurt me. I didn’t feel safe. I do wish I hadn’t had to have done it. I do hold it accountable for at least a portion of the searing loneliness, the cognitive dissonance, the crashing depressions I had in those days.

And yet I don’t leave it behind, for I still am here, on some stage, taking things off and showing them to people I don’t know.

And my parents still don’t really want to know about it.

Comments

[VJ]

And without it all you would have lead a slightly less interesting life, but still would have been able to put Wittgenstein's poker some place proper no doubt. There are indeed plenty of people who lead quiet lives of desperation doing things they really don't think they ought to, all in order just to get by. Between the choice of failing and stasis, most will chose to move, even at some radical & very consequential costs. The people who stay, despite never having a real chance at their goals or dreams, these are the frightened souls, the true conservatives. They are like the lichens. Small but hardy, found in low dank places always hanging on for dear life. Troubles & rain do not kill them. Sunlight does. Cheers & Keep Well, 'VJ'

[ravenna]

"the searing loneliness..." ...of living a secret life. I know it so well. And you said it so well. (I'll buy the book when you write it. I'll be first in line.) Worst of all, being lonely for yourself, the missing parts of yourself, because to live in each world you have to leave part of yourself behind in the other world. What saves me is having one man to love and serve who knows all my secrets and more, who holds all the pieces; and a few others who know some of the worst and the best. And maybe also telling secrets to strangers here on the web, as you do so well, and so much more than I do. I hope with all my heart your loneliness is over. (And if it helps, you can always tell us another secret... ;-)

[Minerva]

What a beautiful and inspiring post.. It is that disparity which energises your writing, which lets you identify with Yeats and the others.. On the one hand the stripping was offering an illusion of happiness to those who watched and the money perhaps offered an illusion too, but where was the reality? There is a wonderful book in those years of loneliness and unhappiness... I know that real feeling of not wanting the grief and rather to be 'contented' but those hard years have fed the wonderful person that we all know here..Remember, we know you, know your secrets and we all accept you and love coming back,

Minerva

[Karl Elvis]

Wow that's a great piece.

Wow.

And you know, thanks.

[Goose]

I really liked this piece. I felt kind of hit by it, by what we chose to keep secret, what we have to keep secret, and what others want us to keep secret. Thanks CG.
Goose

[chelsea girl]

Thanks you all. I really appreciate your support for my .007 angst.

Kisses. Kisses. Kisses. Kisses. Kisses, Carl Elvis. Kisses.

[early]

I don't know you. I know me. I grew up in the bible belt; my problem was that I asked who made god? Along with other children asking "silly" questions we were told to be careful; the devil could get us.....WTF! Well here I am. I am in the porn business and business is good. I found that these "good Christians" are the cause of most people's guilt hang-ups. I'm still here. I haven't been struck down by some mystical force. I make lots of money and give a lot to charity. I don't have any restless nights, because I am not controlled by the money making religions. As far as people looking at me funny, when I say,"I'm in adult productions", that is their problem if the fact ruins their paradigm for the day.

Also, my wife danced at a club in Texas. It is called Sugars. It is a very upscale club. She is proud of it.

[Shay]

Well I hope that you at least feel less lonely and more safe here than you did on stage.
As much as we would hate to lose your blog, we would also hate to be causing you pain.

[Pussy Talk]

The hardest part about writing my sex journal is keeping it secret, and maintaining the requisite compartmentalisation that follows upon the secret: drawing lines and keeping them distinct between this life and that one is an unbreakable rule. God forbid that a line should be crossed out of forgetfulness or fatigue or sheer stupidity.

It's like sitting on top of a volcano. You just don't know when---or if---the damn thing will blow sky high. But what choice do you have, when you are addicted to this hotdirty prettydumb little creation of your very own?

DTG xxoo

[magdelena]

Jesus CG, you are such a powerful writer. Minerva speaks for me here, in words more elegant than I can find because you've hit me so hard with this post . As an undergraduate I worked as a stripper for the 6 weeks leading up to Christmas. Only my partner knew and given the proximity of the club to my university, it was pretty rash. I also worked part time at a regular job. I lived in eternal fear of these different lives crossing, especially of one of my lecturers coming into the club. One day, at my conventional job I looked up and into the eyes of a girl I stripped with. We both looked terrified and then it softened into a warm understanding. Honour amonsgt thieves and all that, she left quietly.

I experience shadows of those feelings as a sex blogger and I always feel immensely relieved when I learn that others do too.Secrets are beautiful and wonderful and powerful and we must treat them with care.

You rock girl and this is one awesome post. Thankyou.

[alwaysarousedgirl]

I think the most painful kind of secrets are the ones that you can't tell to the people who are the very closest to you. Are they really all that close to you if you can't tell them everything? If you know they'll hate something about you?

I ask myself those questions daily.

These stories will make a great book someday.

[Introspectre]

You and I seem to be traveling along the same road on this one.
I find I want to expose more of myself, but that frightens me. Do I do it anyway to get over the fear, or is that further traumatization? If I hide parts of me, I feel ashamed. I want to throw them out and scream, "LOOK AT IT!", and I've had many long days of emotionally vomiting through my keyboard and into cyberspace.

Where is the line between releasing the shame and a sort of masochism?

(shakes head slowly) I don't know. I don't know.

[Demon Queen]

I have led a terribly boring life and my mom is still an idiot. I think it's their natural state to avoid unpleasantries(my mom's word, not mine).
To minimize things until they are easier to deal with, compartmentalize, tie it up in a nice gingham bow and set it in the back of a cupboard.

Here is a an honest-to-god true convo with my mom.

Mom: The guy who touched your breasts when you were a kid was arrested.
Me: He didn't just touch my breasts mom, he molested me.
Mom: He did? Why didn't you tell me?
Me: I did. About a hundred times over the last 15 years.
Mom: Well, he's in jail now. Maybe he'll finally get help for his problem.
Me: *stunned silence*

I feel ya sister.
You are beautiful and your honesty is breath-taking.

[dexplorer]

Do you allow comments to very old posts? (I'm going through a lot of your archives; I'm sure MANY who find your blog do as well, after reading current stuff for a bit.) If you do, either let this question appear for a bit, until I post a real comment here (a very positive one and sharing some stuff about me in NYC at the time), or if you don't want to allow this question to post, email me that you do allow. If it doesn't appear and I don't hear, I'll assume the answer is no.

BTW, you're quite wonderful you know.