sex positive

The Next Queer Book You Should Read

/ Ty..Bo / 2 Comments

“Are you going to stop dressing like a gas station attendant now?” This wasn’t the first time my mother had asked me that. We’d been fighting about my appearance since the seventies, a decade that still employed gas station attendants.”

Ty Bo Yule, Chemically Enhanced Butch
The Flaming Carnival of Deviance:Read It!

Happy Pride Queers! I know it was yesterday. That means today, I get to promote the book I wrote. It’s called Chemically Enhanced Butch. It’s a queer memoir, but funny. It’s the coming of age tale of the old school butch you’ve been waiting for. Look at that carabiner on my belt loop. You have to earn that many keys. I opened the last dyke bar in the upper Midwest to get those keys.

The bar didn’t last, because the best things in life never do, though I did accidentally nail some guy in the junk with that hammer. I eventually made the decision to grow my own sideburns instead of pasting hair clippings to my face, so I don’t know if I still get to call myself a butch, but I do, and we can talk about it.

“For the space of a song, I achieved the Rainbow Connection that Kermit the Frog had once promised me as a child.” 

Ty Bo Yule, Chemically Enhanced Butch

I’m of an age (fifty) when I can still remember Ronald Reagan and Tammy Faye (before she became a drag queen) and mullets unironically. I got to spend my twenties in San Francisco. That was the 90s y’all, RIP. So many girlfriends, so many drugs. I had a motorcycle and a mohawk. I really miss being that attractive, but I don’t miss being that dumb.

“But if I had to pick a moment in my life, like if a genie was forcing me, to go back and whisper some hard-won insight to a younger me, I would go back to early 1991, when I drove over that hill by Candlestick Park and saw the San Francisco skyline for the first time. I would tell that twenty- one-year-old dummy, “Pay attention. This is special. You’ll never see anything like this again.”

Ty Bo Yule, Chemically Enhanced Butch

I didn’t take testosterone until I was 41, during my second semester at Harvard Divinity School. That’s another good story. Spoiler alert – it involves another doomed encounter with a pretty straight girl. Could my character be any more inevitable?

“She couldn’t have anticipated the out-of-control rock-’n’-roll semi, overloaded with grief and tornadoes, she was encountering when she made her first clever jest to me. She was just hoping for an escort into the forbidden roadside queer juke joint she hadn’t yet had the occasion to see.”

Ty Bo Yule, Chemically Enhanced Butch

Butches are hot and insecure, heroic and unsympathetic, well-meaning and woefully overwhelmed. We wrangle an unfathomable amount of complexity into that Dickie’s short-sleeve button up. Often we spend a decent majority of our energy trying to showcase our magic to our parents and normative society, in general. Alas, the only way their untrained eyes would ever be able to discern it, however, would be if we managed to change the world. That is why we spend the rest of our time pretending we are secret Hobbit superhero, unless we are busy getting a new cute girl an almond milk, half-caff, chai latte.

After decades of depression and terrible decisions, sifting through cliches and archetypes, some of us find a place in our bodies to negotiate a truce with our demons. I’ll take this happily ever after. That is an act of resilience and transgression that does actually change the world.

Come read my story. Be a pirate with me. Be weird with me. Have difficult conversations with me. If you’re a misfit, you’re not alone.

Links to buy the ebook on my homepage. Paperbacks coming in July.

Wet Dream Messenger

/ Ty..Bo / 4 Comments

I’ll measure time
I’ll measure height
I’ll calculate
My birthrite
Good Lord I’m big
I’m heading on
Man-size 
Got my leather boots on – PJ Harvey, Man-size

Are wet dreams common?  For whom?  I haven’t heard much talk about them lately.  I have had one.  It visited me when I was around sixteen.  It was a ‘point-of-view’ production.  I was driving an old muscle car with black leather bucket seats and a long-handled gear shift.  I was alone, driving fast.  I especially remember the sky as a hi-def, David Lynch dream sequence kind of hot orange.  There were mountains on both sides and I was approaching a narrow, flat bridge across an impossibly wide and deep gorge.  I felt rising pleasure and excitement.  I looked down and noticed my big, hard cock in my own left hand.  The mountains receded from around me as I drove faster onto the bridge.  I watched myself stroke myself faster as I drove faster, not looking up at the road.  As I was about to cum, the car/I veered sharply to the left, quickly breaking through the low guard rail and into mid-air.  I never saw the bottom and I didn’t fall for long.  I woke up sweating and panting with throbbing clit.

I am not someone who remembers my dreams often, nor even many singular waking events in my life, but this was an omen with no intention of being forgotten.  The uncanny physicality of the actual dream and of me and of the darkness of my bedroom continues to stick to me, though it’s been almost thirty years (or more, my age is the most arbitrary part of this narrative).  I immediately thought I had just witnessed how I died in a past life.  This is hilarious, if true, that there may be some part of my eternal soul that is so fascinated with my own penis and touching it and admiring it that it not only caused my death at least once, but that this self-destructive compulsion follows me into every incarnation.  I am still a little cockcentric, though I do not possess one in this lifetime.

Occasionally, I pull out this wet dream to help me think critically about gender.  I think it is a versatile metaphor for gender experience.  Had I been born with a penis, I imagine that I would have been experienced this dream as fairly unremarkable.  Having a penis and dreaming about touching it probably doesn’t stimulate much analysis of the link between masculinity and a cock in cis-men.  I have had sex in other dreams with my own body, but never resulting in spontaneous orgasm.  I don’t recall ever having another dream where I so viscerally embodied an alternate flesh.  It felt real.  This sensation of ‘realness’ and its fickle presence is a bit of what I believe gender performance desires.  It was probably the most experiential moment of maleness in my life, but much of the time, I don’t even know if ‘male’ is what I have wanted to achieve.

This vivid dream, an altered state of consciousness is not completely unlike the daily involuntary masculinity I perform.  My masculinity perpetually defies the fact of my body.  When I am alone, I must touch my female genitals to masturbate, though I may be fantasizing about having an erect penis and putting it where I imagine it would feel good to my phantom limb.  When I am not alone, my gender performance, to the extent that it is successful and fulfilling for myself and others, must necessarily be collaborative.  When I put my silicon penis on and have sex with my girlfriend, we must both suspend disbelief to achieve the desired intimacy.  It is infinitely hotter to tell someone to suck your cock, than to suck your strapon.  I cannot feel my penis inside her, but the illusion helps me orgasm nonetheless.  Practically speaking, it might seem more desirable to have her go down on the anatomy I do have, but the reaffirmation of my masculine identity is just as important, if not more, than an orgasm.  This is why stone butches exist.  At least they used to.

When surrounded by other urban queers, being a masculine woman is an intelligible identity, easily integrated into social discourse, verbal and non-verbal.  When in normative surroundings, the dominant paradigm polices and excludes and mocks the masculine woman.  Cis-gendered, heteronormative people sometimes don’t like to play dress up with you and your arduously crafted gender identity.  Suddenly, the recollection that your masculinity is a dirty adolescent dream you once had hits you like shame pie in your girl face.  In the life of a young butch, those moments of cognitive dissonance assemble to form a relentless clown parade of humiliation.  Oh, young butches, I just want to send you all to Pippi Longstocking Island with horses, and femmes, and proud moms who never want you to wear a dress, and dads you can beat at basketball.

At forty-one, I made the decision to transition.  Into what, is unclear to me, possibly because I am one of those people who uncritically link maleness with penises.  But, I love taking testosterone.  Adult puberty is so much more fun than menopause.  One of the multitude of benefits that I perceive for my life is simply the public plausibility of my act.  It is exhausting to be a constant subject of internal conflict for others.

Once I had a dream that I was a man.  I came all over myself, then I died.  The body that bares the life that I have had deserves the entitlements it has earned and the pleasures it can experience.

Silence my lady head
Get girl out of my head
Douse hair with gasoline
Set it light and set it free, PJ Harvey, Man-size

Suspension of disbelief or willing suspension of disbelief is a term coined in 1817 by the poet and aesthetic philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who suggested that if a writer could infuse a “human interest and a semblance of truth” into a fantastic tale, the reader would suspend judgment concerning the implausibility of the narrative.

I’m too old to do this.

/ Ty..Bo / 2 Comments

Image

I tell stories all the time.  I think I am a good storyteller.  I think I have good stories to tell.  That is what I have instead of a fake job at Target Corporate that doesn’t even make sense.  That’s me in the picture.  I was taking that for my new girlfriend.  I don’t remember if I sent that one to her or not.  That’s my little apartment in Brookline, MA.  I stayed there while I was getting my master’s degree from Harvard Divinity School.  I went to Harvard because the dyke bar in Minneapolis that I opened, closed and I was emotionally broken and forty and I didn’t know what else to do.  My new girlfriend stayed in Minneapolis.  Long-distance relationships are horrible and I was crazy jealous and had just started taking testosterone.  You can see the hint of a new goatee as well as a little cleavage under my creepy bathrobe, which I think is hot.  I’ve been home for a couple years now, and things are great.  I just have some stories to tell.  I have more facial hair now, but I still have my tits.  I wanted to call this blog ‘hairy tits’, but people keep cringing every time I say that.  I do actually want people to cringe a little at this blog, though.  I want commentary and resistance and conversation.  I want to talk about sex and gender and body parts (silicon or flesh) in a more uncomfortable way.  The blogs I’ve read about queers, transmen, and butches (and that’s not really that many) have been pretty tame and have narratives we have become comfortable with.  They talk about bowties, and binding, and bathrooms, which are fun and fuzzy subjects that warm the queer cockles like a drag queen doing Whitney Houston, and these stories create community and are important.  I think my transition is one of my least interesting stories, but it will be fun to read, nonetheless.  I am a lazy, lazy transman, if you insist upon calling me that.  I do like muscles and wanting to fuck all the time.  I miss San Francisco in the 90’s.  I miss punk rock.  I miss sex-positive, bald, dyke whores… most of the time.  I am also getting to old for that shit all the time.  I do not miss being a baby butch disco queen in LA in the 80’s, but that happened.  I really like being happy and well-rested.  I have a lot of great stories though.  I wanted to write a book, but Katrina told me that people blog now.  After much initial resistance, I found the rambling serial format might actually work better.  My best stories are about opening a dyke bar, but that requires background.  I want to talk about sex and gender deeply.  I want to know about your dark sides and tell you about mine, because I tend to think our common narratives, as valuable as they are to our community, are mostly incomplete, and largely horseshit.  My dream would be a community of weirdo truth-tellers. Let’s fix modern psychology together and even teach Judith Butler a thing or two about gender.  Mostly, I’m going to tell stories though, really good ones.