Riki Anne Wilchins

LINES IN THE SAND, CRIES OF DESIRE

"We are the women who like to come, and come hard."
Amber Hollibaugh

We spoke last week: just your average phone call. And then, just as we're getting off, you suggest I might want to write about the boundaries where my different selves meet: the complexity of this place, its borders and contours. And your suggestion leaves my face burning with shame and anger as if I had been stuck: who has ever wanted to hear such things, and where on earth is the boundary where a lesbian, a pre-operative transexual with a cock, a woman, a femme, an addict, an incest survivor, and a post- operative transexual with a cunt intersect? Upon what map is it drawn, and upon what states does it border?

I have spent my life exploring the geography of this place, mastering unfamiliar terrain and alien customs, wandering regions as fresh, as uncharted, as inexplicable to me as private visions; surveyed its pathways as ignorant and blind as any first-time explorer, and finally discovered myself at day's end: lost, alone, bewildered and afraid. With time, my tracks have intersected and converged, crisscrossed again and again, until at last they have woven their own pattern: my life itself has become the place where these different selves meet, my skin the boundary which contains them, and the women in my life the states upon which it borders.

Now you say you want to hear about this place, its complexities and desires, its contours and terrain. It is 1:00 Saturday night, and at the moment I am more involved with the contours and terrain of the cock dangling about 2 inches before my face. I am 42, and I have been coming to this mostly straight, couples-only sex club in mid-Manhattan for almost a year now, working my way through acts successively more challenging and frightening for me, pushing back the boundaries of what I can do or imagine, practicing with newfound skill staying present and connected during sex, exorcising demons and ghosts by now so familiar I know their names and faces within an environment so anonymous I often don't know those of my partners. A place where straightforward sex is the commodity, physical beauty the currency, and lust the only coin. This is the ground I have chosen to confront my deep fear of butch or masculine sexuality, of possession and surrender, power and vulnerability, where I can finally recover the much, the many, the myriad ways and fragments of my life lost to incest, transexuality, shame and self-hate. I am trying to reclaim myself and I want my body back.

I want my body back.

I want my clit, my scrotum, my vagina, my cock, my beard. My buttocks, my thighs, my bush, my asshole, my urethra, my semen. My lips, my tongue, my wetness and my saliva. I want my breasts back, the ones I watched go through a second complete puberty at 29. I want my nipples back, with the scars just beneath my pink areolae where the implants went in, the left incision making the nipple over my heart mostly numb to touch or tongue. I want the scar on my throat, the one people notice and ask about thyroid conditions, the one opened to shave my adams apple down. And I want the scars you can't see, on the inside of my labia; the ones you get by doing the stitching from the inside, so they don't show. The ones which ache when I'm getting ill and itch strangely when I'm getting exhausted.

I want my body back. I want the clear ejaculate which still trickles from my urethra when I come hard and fast. I want my clit back, the one the super surgeons, who can make almost anything into almost anything else, made by transplanting the very head, the glans, of my beautiful, long ivory pink and blue-veined penis right between my labia and then waiting 3 months for it to heal and the blood supply to stabilize, and then in a second operation, carved down to the little clit-like apparatus I have now, which is somehow still so sensitive it makes me tense and shiver as his wife uses her left hand to open my lips and her right to rub it inquiringly, watching my face closely for any reaction and then smiling in satisfaction when my eyes unfocus, my stomach muscles harden and my thighs spread a little of their own accord.

In my mouth goes his prick, tasting of first of latex and then nonoxidyl-9, which makes my lips and tongue go ugly bitter and numb. A little gag starting and then he is in my mouth and firming up nicely, the glans beginning to extend itself along my tongue and pushing up against the roof of my palate. An exciting and strange experience this, but stranger still is having had a cock and having had women go down on it, I'm unwillingly, suddenly, almost shockingly aware of how each movement of my lips and tongue must feel to him. Strange too, is that nerve endings which once made their home in my cock, and which now nestle in my cunt, are starting to remember too, and they're getting hot, turgid, and wet and for several transcendent moments I cannot distinguish if I'm giving head to him, or to me.

He is fully erect now, much like my dildo except the skin of his penis is very smooth and gripping it with both hands, I feel an unexpected softness around a firm core. After a moment I begin turning on my hands and knees, moving around on the mattress to face his wife as we begin to kiss. Her black hair is loose and shoulder-length, her mouth is soft and wet and opens to hard little biting edges which nip at my mouth, tongue and neck. I notice the small, downy hairs on her forearm glistening in the damp overhead light: its muscles work as she reaches for my cunt again, turning the hair blond as it catches the light.

Exorcising demons and ghosts: I told my closest friend I was 41 and knew nothing about men and didn't want to wake up at 51 and still know nothing, but the truth is much closer to the bone. The truth is that unable to outrun or contain the contradictions of my life, I had been celibate for the past 5 years. And with celibacy I had dead-ended into every cold and silent secret I had trailed behind me into a dozen monogamous relationships and scores of one-night stands but never once confronted, 'til at last it dawned on me, laying in a bed I had entered only hours ago and would never see again, my hand cradling my chin as I watched the sunlight slowly traversing the coverlet, that all my adult life I had successfully avoided anyone butch enough to turn me on or top me.

And so your question brings me back here, to things I dream of alone at night, to desires I acknowledge in the dark, to exposed edges and hot, melting shame. To the things about which I neither speak nor write, to the things about which I truly care and therefore make a career of avoiding. "Your writing is very direct", you said, "you're very in-your-face." Well I haven't had much choice. As far back as I can remember, my life has been a puzzle with missing pieces.

I hadn't even known the word "transexual", nor that it was a word meant for me. In fact, I hadn't even known if transexuals really existed, until at 28 I read Christine Jorgenson's book and finally admitted to being one. A year later, strung out, a suicide note wound in the typewriter and the garden hose snaked out to my shit-green Volkswagen, I knew I would have surgery or have and end to it. I remember thinking I could always return to this place, but it would be a shame indeed if a liveable life was waiting on the other side of surgery with a patient, indulgent smile and I had not lived to see it. So I hauled my weary white ass into the Cleveland Clinic Hospital's Gender Identity Program. But transexual women were supposed to be straight, and I had never looked twice at a man, nor felt any erotic heat in their presence.

Determined to be a "successful" transexual, I worked earnestly at being straight, at developing the proper attraction to men. I examined their firm little butts, learning to decipher which were cute and which not. I cruised the hair on their chests, their beards, clothing and stance, the width of their shoulders and the bulge of their cocks, judging its length and thickness by the way it deformed the smooth, muscular profile of whichever jean-clad thigh it was worn. I faithfully reported each foray into heterosexuality to the hospital's noncommittal therapist, desperate to be the good patient upon whom she would confer surgery when my waiting time was up.

I finally informed her that I could not be straight, that I was, in fact, a compete bust with men, that the only thing which still gave me my somewhat limp, estrogen-impaired erections were other women. I knew then, suicidal as I was and living day-to-day only awaiting surgery, that when they threw me out I might make that trek out to the Volkswagen after all. "Oh yes", she said, as she peered up from my manila-foldered chart, "we had one of those last year," and she went back to writing case notes in my chart about my "illness," and I went back to breathing.

This was pretty amazing stuff at the time. The head of the only other gender program in town had solemnly informed me I could not be a lesbian. "All transexual women," he declared, "want to be penetrated." Well, yes. But I thought maybe he knew even less about woman-to-woman sex than I did, and fearing his primitive sexual cosmology was accepted as revealed truth within the profession I hoped would save my life, I determined to keep my attraction to women as secret as my own pulse.

So I learned that I could be a transexual, and attracted to women as well. But could I be a lesbian? Certainly the lesbianism into which I came out in the 70's said I could not. It told me then, as it often does, that I was a surgically-altered male, a man invading "women's" space, my trespass tolerable to the precise extent I displayed the very oppressive, stereotypically feminine behaviors from which many lesbians were in the most headlong flight. As for what lesbians did in bed, the women's community into which I emerged reversed the statement of the doctors: "No lesbian," it solemnly intoned, "wants to be penetrated." Penetration, I learned, was for straight girls.

A transexual she-male freak and a lesbian slut turned on by penetration in an orifice still under construction was bad enough, but even worse, I found out that the type of lesbian I wanted meant I was "into roles". I say I was "into roles," but in truth, it was all in my head. I learned from all quarters that "roles" were dead. Interred with them went the best of my desires: those strong, femmy butches who strode arrogantly across my dreams and scared me half to death with their power and my need.

And perhaps roles were dead, for in truth I saw neither femmes nor their butches at the few women's bars or functions I was allowed to attend. Even lesbians who professed support for "roles" were roundly ignored or actively reproached. The lesbianism into which I came out was dry and pale and bordered by bowl haircuts, no makeup, torn jeans, half-buttoned ubiquitous flannel shirts and humorless, hurting women whose sexuality was firmly suppressed, politically obedient, and completely foreign to my own erotic tides.

I didn't know butches and femmes still existed, or even if they ought to, until you started telling me about them. You taught me the theory, and even more you taught me respect, resuscitating the femme parts of me with words like "complex," "courageous," "many-layered," and "specifically lesbian." "For many years now", you wrote me, "I have been trying to figure how to explain the special nature of butch-femme relationships to feminists and lesbian-feminists who consider butch-femme a reproduction of heterosexual models and therefore dismiss lesbian communities of the past and of the present that assert this style."

It was not until sometime later that you taught me the practice as well, and moreover that the women I craved still existed, that it was okay for me to want them and imagine them, to picture their hands and cocks and hunger as I lay across my bed, eyes closed and back arched, rubbing the middle finger of my right hand across my own recently-made clit and pushing the new dildo I'd trimmed to just the right size and shape deep into my own improbable, impossible cunt.

"Oh, my darling, this play is real," you wrote me once about your lover. "I do long to suck you, to take your courage into my mouth, both cunt, your flesh, and cock, your dream, deep into my mouth, and I do... She moans, moves, tries to watch, and cannot as the image overpowers her... and then she reaches down and slips the cock into me... I fall over her... I am pounding the bed, her arms, anything I can reach. How dare you do this to me, how dare you push me beyond my daily voice, my daily body, my daily fears. I am changing; we are dancing. We have broken through."

And I wondered if I would ever break through, as I wandered through one night stands and short-time lovers, remembered the details of their bodies but not their faces, their technique but not their words. I actively avoided the type of woman who turned me on, turned aside their gaze, saw them in bars and left. Each time some hidden place inside me burned with a pain I forbid myself to touch or explore, desires and needs which are well-described by words like "many layered" and "complex," but which are far more distressing and aching than the crisp, black letters on the flat white pages containing them.

The truth is I had used sex but could not submit to it, and the truth is I could come but I could not be present in my body nor use it to express vulnerability or surrender. Sex was something I exchanged for safety or shelter or companionship. Sex was something to attract a lover who wasn't sure if she wanted a transexual, and later sex was something to bind her to me through the shit she would take from friends. And after it was over, sex was a way to be a child again for an hour, maybe two, in safe warm arms.

Sex was a way to humiliate myself and my lovers, to suppress and yet simultaneously revisit again and again those childhood nights when the humiliation was mine and mine alone and the hot breath on my neck and back belonged to a complete stranger who only looked like my father and whom I met only in the dark. For the truth is, every time I tried to make love, the image of my father hovered above whatever bed I was in like some kind of demented crucifix hung on the wall over our heads, and the path I had tread so long back to my sexuality, my body, and my lesbian self led in a beeline as long and straight and narrow as the lane-line down a flat-back Kansas highway right through to my father.

Incest is a word too ugly and short to do justice to something which is much more than simply ugly and too often not blessedly short. Incest is a daily thing, like the news, like dinner, like brushing your teeth. You can carry it around like a stick of gum in your pocket. It marks your body like a cancerous mole or a burn from hot cooking oil. It colors your thoughts like a drop of ink in a glass of water, and it poisons your life like shit down a well.

There are flavors and varieties of incest. There is the nice, simple kind that comes accompanied by clear, sharp snapshot memories developed by Polaroid. These are the ones you can take out and show your friends, who will commiserate, your therapist, who will analyze, and your family, who will deny. They are terrifying, but at least they have defined shapes, colors and dimensions, and also at least they are known.

Then there are those as hard to grasp as smoke, the invasions and violations not captured on neat Kodachrome squares, lacking specific memories and penetrations.. This is the kind I remember best: just the sight and sense of probing fingers or too intimate caresses or special glances and the adult passions of a parent too hot and close and hungry for a needy child to understand. The kind which later in life announces itself with only vague and confusing physical and emotional memories, welling up without warning or reason from unknown and uncharted underground springs from acts carried out at an age so tender there were no words to frame and recall them; or perhaps a little older still, when words were at the ready and nearby, but quickly buried so well and far away they have no known latitude or longitude now but still manage to wake you from the dark in that familiar sweet sweat with your perpetrator's smell all over them, and your inner child screaming with fear and rage like a wounded banshee in the close night air.

And there is another kind of incest, a kind no one even names. This is the transexual kind and it is a symphony of abuse. It is the Bach and Beethoven, the Haydn and Mozart of incest. It is orchestrated and complex, with woodwinds and strings, brass notes, and deep, bass rhythms. It involves forcing female children to live as boys, withheld hormones and medical treatment, and quick, vicious punishment by those people you love and trust the most for the slightest omission or infraction in dress or behavior. Its terrors and confusions culminate in a second puberty in the full glare of midlife adulthood, followed by a gaudy, ebaroque crescendo of doctors and scalpels and stitches and blood which, however good the surgery, still leaves you feeling violated and broken inside somehow and never quite sane in your body again.

And I am thinking of this, of your words and my life, as I feel his hands on me from behind now, warm and dry, rubbing gently on my buttocks, moving in widening circles until they pause and then dip between my legs, finding and then caressing the pink skin whose origins and construction I still cannot imagine. A single finger pauses at my cunt, stroking just inside my vagina and then tunnels slowly inward, so slowly in fact that I cannot refrain from pushing back, surprising myself with a soft moan which sounds vaguely ridiculous, even to me. Even to me, who has walked the halls of this place many evenings, just listening to the sounds of women caught in the distress of their own lust, their over-heated cries and whimpers clutching at my damp insides like a strong hand or running clean through my body like an ice pick through warm butter.

His finger slides out of my pussy now and I feel the first taut nudge of his cock. Holding it in his right hand, he searches patiently for my open, wondering vagina. After a year of work, my own dance is about to begin. You have helped to bring me here. I wonder: what will you think reading this? Will you be able to see the lesbian in me, in my experience? Have I come through so many rejections to face another? And if you cannot read this, and read in it other lesbian lives and identities and appetites and passions, then who will? I have heard my own echo in your voice. Will you hear yours in mine?

Our lives become the enactment of those things we can think, the erotic acts and petty daily defiances of the fears which haunt the borders of what we will confess to desiring, what we can imagine ourselves wanting to do with our own bodies and those of our lovers. The borders are not drawn by us, but by our fears, lines drawn in the sands of our need by rape or shame or abuse, imaginary lines in shifting sands we dare not cross. And standing beyond those lines are the women who have gone before, who have stepped past and returned to tell us what lies beyond, and about the parts of our lives we have lost, whose words we can read but not yet write, whose stories, at once terrifying and exciting, we carry around for years, running them over and over in our minds like old movie reels until at last we recognize them as our own, coming back to us like prodigal children returned in the night or the echoes of our own voices, thrown back at us from a cry of desire uttered so long ago, and in such pain, we neither recall it nor recognize its origins as our own.

He finds my vagina and gripping my hips, he uses both of his wide hands to pull me back onto his cock. I feel my body parting to take him in, a familiar-strange feeling of pressure-pleasure as he enters me confidently, until at last he is in my flesh up to the hilt. I am struggling to take all of him now, and to stay connected as well: feeling him, testing myself, tightening obscure muscles somewhere far up inside my vagina. He pulls me back, the air forced from my lungs as if someone has struck lightly at my stomach, and just as I catch my breath he begins to move, accelerating now, the apex of his thrusts going off like some liquid explosion deep in the center of my pelvis. I am filled with a kind of wonder now, my body showing me things novel and unsuspected.

In slow motion I close my eyes and collapse into his wife's waiting arms. They know it is my first time, and she gently gathers me in, her hands cradling my face, pulling it down and in between her legs. I begin to lick her thighs, her groin, her clit, anything my hungry little mouth can reach, the sweet- smelling hair of her bush containing the sounds now coming from my throat. She laughs, a quick, easy sound, as I raise my hips to take more of her husband's cock inside me. Her plump, buttersmooth hips are tightly encircled, my arms gathering her whole cunt onto my mouth. I suck on it viciously, teething like an infant with bottle while another part of me concentrates on withstanding each delicious withdrawal and fresh, fierce entrance. I am in a kind of heaven, and for the first time in my life I am present in my body and unafraid and I am on wings.

"We are the women who like to come, and come hard," Amber Hollibaugh said. "I am a femme, not because I want a man, but because I want to feel a butch's weight on my back, and feel a butch moving inside my body." And nice as his maleness is, it is neither female nor what I want and I begin to play with my head a little, imagining he is a woman and his dick, a dildo strapped on with a soft butch's contradictory, perfectly masculine arrogance. Pleased and emboldened by the effect she is having, she uses her knees to lever my legs further apart. "Is it okay for you, honey?," she taunts, holding me like that for long seconds, pressing into me, pushing relentlessly forward and down, purposefully using her full weight so I need all my strength to support us both.

She leans far forward over the long muscles of my back, taking her time to pinch each of my nipples, and then pausing to wipe the small beads of sweat which have collected at my temples. "What's wrong, baby, is it too much for you?" she purrs, and pulling me backwards she enters me so deeply the O-ring of her strap is suddenly clear and cold on my butt. I catch a glimpse of her over my shoulder, wearing the smile she flashes like a hidden blade, her teeth gleaming in the dim light with pleasure as my face contorts with that far-away look as if I'd heard the whistle of a train, high-pitched and way off in the distance. Her free hand slips beneath me, trails along my belly, oblivious to my hips jerking sideways, avoiding her, knowing her intent. She searches diligently for my clit, finds it, and begins to worry it, rubbing patiently from side to side with practiced, entirely successful fingers.

I am completely still now, holding my breath to deny her the reward of further response. Until something deep inside me just snaps, bursts clean; and groaning with rage and lust my back arches, a proverbial cat in heat, and she, laughing out loud, answers. Strong, veined hands grip my hips, and she makes the first, killing thrust that begins her final motion, and I know now that she will come fucking me, shouting hoarsely and thrusting into me just as hard as she is able. The warm honey- butter-blood begins to flood the cradle of my cunt and I realize that for once, my father is nowhere to be seen, no, nor my fear of masculinity and submission, of penetration and vulnerability, and closing my eyes to surrender to the first delicious tugs of orgasm, I know for the first time and with a certainty beyond simple trust that I am free.