Selling Out All These Years

“You’ve never been one of them,” one of my friends told me after I leaned on her to decompress from one of the most male-dominated, fuck male-dominated, suit-dominated conferences I’d ever attended. Not one of them, being, the women, the dozen or so women in the room who, if I’d been more naive, I’d be assuming would have my back.

“I bet they never see you coming,” said one of my bosses once. “I bet you clean up nice.” She was tattooed, older than me, had a graduate degree I’m still years from, and was the new executive director of the nonprofit health clinic that had just hired me. My job was to hustle — to write grants, get us money, keep us afloat. “How do you feel about sitting across from a table full of old men in suits and asking them for money?” a former board member asked me. “That sounds like what I do all the time,” I said.

I started in on this thing, about passing, in a comment on Dacia’s post on class and elitism in the sex industry — on how, without visible body mods, with white skin, with blonde (not as natural as it could be) hair, and WASPy looks (I’m Italian and Catholic, actually), I get away with a hell of a lot more than a filthy whore like I supposedly am is supposed to get away. I’ve been in and out of academia, of faith organizations, with NGO’s, circled the tech scene, the sex industry itself — all of these male-dominated spaces. I’m comfortable in them. If anything, it’s because I’ve seen the same men who dominate them, naked and on their knees and crying and aching and handing me their cash for the honor.

But aside from that? I’ve been lucky. I’ve never had a straight male boss. I’ve worked in female-dominated workplaces, for female-dominated boards, with female-dominated supervision. I sat on my first corporate board of directors when I was 26. All of that comes from having spent as much time in the non-profit world as I have in the sex industry, and in my last job, at the sex worker health clinic St. James Infirmary, the marriage of both.

When I enter a room of suits (like the conference last week, which was called Supernova and was concerned with the business of the internet and which I was covering for Valleywag), it’s never the women who put me at instant ease. It’s the the other freaks: the femmey guys, the queers, the girl with the lip ring, the boy with the crazy boots. The women in tech I once looked to for support, though they may have once thought I was a cute enough anomaly to tolerate when I could be their Token Whore Speaker, are not the instant allies the web sisterhood wants you to believe they are. It’s not okay to say this, but I’m scared that for most women, period, feminism is no longer about breaking the rules men have set, but learning men’s rules well enough to seem like they’re playing along. But that’s probably exactly what some women think I’m doing when I take (or took) my clothes off for money. I’m out of reasons to explain why it wasn’t. I can point to my home, my city, my lovers, my friends, my community, my work as reasons, as proof — that I made it in my own fucking Sinatra way, and that my voice is worthy.

Last night Nick and I went to see Taylor Mac, a wholly fierce drag performer, at a little theatre half a block from the Infirmary. I bumped into two of my co-workers, Blake — a podcaster and phlebotomist and filmmaker — and Ginger — a burlesque performer and researcher. Both are shaking shit up in the world in ways that are so severe, from organizing support groups for transgender women with HIV to volunteering to translate for sex worker human rights activists in Taiwan to just fucking showing up at the clinic to do what needs to be done. They smiled and were warm and we just went back to being family in our tiny hellos on a dark street.

Taylor Mac sings ukulele-accompanied love songs about Saddam Hussein and Lynne Cheney, gets a straight audience member to dress in a magenta mylar deconstructed frock and sing “The Revolution Will Not Be Masculinized.” Before he started he asked all the heterosexuals to raise their hands, and here Nick does and I don’t and no one really notices. Even walking around the Mission and holding hands and eating ice cream and looking for all intents and purposes like a painfully straight couple on a day of gay marriage in a month of queer jubilation, we could still get away with snickering at the out of town lesbians who were too overwhelmed to cross 16th and Valencia Streets — not for being dykes, but for being tourists. There are places in this city that permit slippage and ones that don’t. We just spent three days in one that certainly didn’t, washed it away with a decent amount of complimentary white wine and a few bouts of sweaty unexpected summer night sex. I felt badly about feeling badly for the Supernova conference goers who couldn’t, but then, I also got relief just walking home and plotting the removal of my corporate drag as soon as I got in the door. But that’s the thing: for me, it’s drag. I spent as much as on my two custom pinstripe wool skirts as I did on a leather corset and a latex dress: because they are fetish, and I only have to wear them when I really want to.

Taylor talks about drag bombs, that he wished he could drop from the sky to hit people rushing head-down to their desks every morning. He says he is fearless because his mentor, a drag queen named Mother Flawless Sabrina, was once shot in the ass as she was walking down the street in New York in all her finery. “Mother Flawless Sabrina, that is awful that is awful that is AWFUL what those men did to you!” he exclaimed.

And of course I dress business sexy when I want to. Of course I work a room. I work everything I’ve got. Once it was called survival. Now I call it work.

“No, no, honey,” Mother Flawless Sabrina told Taylor Mac. “It wasn’t.”

And if that makes other women fearful, that these rules don’t scare me, that I’ve fought and found a way within them, that I have community enough outside them to hold me so when I go to those dull places, I know laughter and wetness and joy and drunkenness and pleasure and bare skin and love is waiting for me when I leave them, that even as they sustain me, that they don’t define me?

“They weren’t bad people,” said Mother Flawless Sabrina. “They just wanted to be part of the show.”