The boiling point: writing life 1988-1999

Okay, I got married (1988). She left (1991), I dropped acid, came out, met my community and CHELSEA, started estrogen, became part of an unintended orgiastic community (1992) transitioned to full-time, became unemployed transsexual, i.e., sex worker(1993). She came back (1994).

I abandoned grad school sublimation/ competition and coherence (repeated sterile attempts to formulate and reformulate Trotskyism) for spontaneity and the TRIPPIE (Transsexual Hippie). Rusty and Chelsea in addition to breaking me of the straight man revolutioinary thing, gave me a much more free understanding of human possibilities beyond the binary Man/Woman system.

I started writing what was going on inside me, combining automatic writing with self-awareness in a healing perspective. In other words Artaud combined with pagan devotion combined with the transgender culture combined with what my friends taught me about who I was. What's that mean? I started to write barely readable but uninhibited lines of poetry that invoked the Goddess I knew to be in me and evoked (I hoped) through raw unedited fonts of language Her Divine presence inside of each of us.

At the same time I felt driven to stay hooking through needing to write aboiut it and community. In other words, I became a political whore (big mistake).

I imitated the possibilities others showed me but I brought concerns and language that were my own. (at least that's what I'm saying here).

1995-1997

Even more hell broke loose. I was labeled and institutionalized psychiatrically (where I discovered a bunch of people with a lot more skill at fighting the imposed reality than I had) and where I filled notebooks with what I thought were deeply original records of my thoughts, e.g. poetry read graphically across the page. (It turns out Rimbaud? had done it a century before). I also wrote political slogans that us politicized queer people used at demonstrations to demand our rights, at least in the City of New York.

1998-1999

Did I write?

As the title of the post says, I began to write life.

Reading: Lesbian mysteries, WEll of Loneliness, Lesbian comics (see something common here?). Also gay classics. Lots and lots of history and culture imbued through the memories of my friends and the deaths of so many from the life we are forced to live. (Right, Julia, you were forced.) Gay classics as well; began to read such pagan perennials as Starhawk's work, Drawing Down the Moon, The Women's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets.

I decided at some point to rather make history than write about it.