Hello From Vacation

Posted on July 6, 2011 in photographs | 3 Comments

Greetings from my hometown in Alaska!

Kristen and I have been here since the 2nd and are leaving tomorrow for some adventures in Seattle for a few more days before we head back east. It’s been a busy trip, my dad turned 60 and we’ve had quite a few memorable nights and wonderful meals with him. 

I have been having a fantastic time. I’ve been on Twitter a bit, sometimes sharing some photos from the trip, so you can follow me there while I’m away. I have a few more things to share with you, but meanwhile, here are a few shots of my hometown. 


Read more

3 Comments | Category: photographs | Tags: , , , , , ,

Ask Me Anything: Does Your Family Read Your Blog?

Posted on June 10, 2011 in omphaloskepsis | 4 Comments

Monday asked:

You get really emotionally and sexually candid (even graphic) in some of your writing. I’m wondering if any member of your or Kristen’s family reads this blog. Do they even know it exists? How much do your families know about this part of both of your lives?

My youngest sister also writes a sex blog (though we’re not really out about being related), so she knows. My other (middle) sister (I’m the oldest) also knows, though I don’t think she reads it regularly. I’m not sure how much either of them read, because, I mean, how much do you really want to know about your sibling’s sex life? I do read my sister’s blog, but I tend to skip over the sex parts—we don’t talk a lot these days, since we both have busy lives in big cities. So this is one way for me to kind of keep up with what’s going on with her. I imagine she reads my blog similarly, though I don’t really know.

My parents know that I write lesbian erotica, and that I’ve been published—I was on the phone with my mom once while she searched for my name in Amazon and was, well, a little surprised with the results. I don’t think she really wants to know about the details of my sexuality, though, so I doubt she has read any of the works that are under my birth name.

My parents also know that I lead workshops, though I usually play up the gender aspects and play down the sex part. Though sometimes I’ve said that I’m doing a class at a sex toy store. So there’s some openness about what I do, but I tend to gloss over the details.

As far as I know, they don’t know my pen name, so they don’t read this. But it really wouldn’t be very hard for them to figure it out, thanks to Facebook—I do tend to promote my events, like Sideshow, on my personal Facebook page, so if my parents really wanted to they could figure out that name, find my Sinclair Sexsmith Facebook fan page, and link it back to this site pretty darn easily.

I don’t know about my extended family, though I think some of them know. My uncle runs a small publishing company and lives in New York City, and he published my most recent chapbook and knows about Sideshow, so again, it wouldn’t take much digging for him to know.

And Kristen’s family … I don’t know. Likewise her sister and parents could probably do some digging from Facebook and figure it out, and I suspect they are more inclined to do that than my family is. Her mom did email me at my mrsexsmith gmail address once, which kind of freaked me out. I’m not sure how she got that address or what it means. But Kristen and I have decided to ignore it, basically—either she’s read all the archives or she hasn’t, and until she brings it up and decides to make an issue of it (which I don’t think she will, since that would involve having a direct conversation about things like sex and, moreso, the lesbian relationship her daughter is in), I’m not going to speculate.

So, now that I’ve gone down the laundry list of relatives, there’s one more thing I want to say about families and sex lives.

Dan Savage on the Savage Love podcast (which is the only podcast that I really keep up with), on the February 1, 2011 show, had guest Amy Lang from BirdsandBeesandKids.com on to field questions about parenting, kids, and sex. (I’d link to it directly but it appears the direct links don’t work, so you’ll just have to find it by date.)

At about 30:30, they play a call from someone with a question about nudity and polyamory, and Amy an Dan use it as a way to explore “the line” between what we should and shouldn’t talk to kids about. What is “too open?” What is appropriate, and what is crossing the line?

Dan: We all had a friend whose parents were too open about sex with their kids and their kids friends, which made us uncomfortable.

Amy: Too open about their own sex lives, which is where I’d like to draw the line. American parents are so worried about giving their kids too much information—it is virutlaly impossible for us to give our kids too much information about sex and relationships. The TMI point? Is THAT. Your sex life! Your kids don’t want to know!

Dan: No!

Amy: Do you want to know that your parents had a sex life?

Dan: My parents had a sex life?!

Amy: No! They didn’t!

Dan: Good! Phew!

Now, I think there should be some acceptance that our parents have a sex life, but I do maintain that I don’t want to hear about it. They go on to discuss polyamory and how to go about being open about that to your kids. But I’m less interested in that conversation and more struck by this TMI point. It has influenced the way I think about this stuff, and its easy for me to then draw there : they are not invited to read it because it is too much of my own sex life.

In my experience, writing about my own sex life worked best when I was (more) anonymous. It was easier to write and be open about what I was doing in bed. It’s harder now, not just because I’m more exposed but also because I’m 2 1/2 years into a relationship, and though we are still having great sex, we’re not as exploratory as we used to be—not in a bad way, there’s just less to xplore now that we’ve been exploring for 2 1/2 years (though we did have foot sex for the first time just the other night … and I have two ‘squirting dildoes’ on my desk that we have yet to try out … )—and the edgy stuff in our relationship is the emotional stuff, the fighting and the growth struggle and hard times we’re going through as we’re building our longer term life together. And while I have written about that (a little), it’s hard because it is deep and sometimes too vulnerable to reveal to such a broad (and sometimes unnecessarily critical) audience.

I would like to continue to write about it, though, despite the challenge.

That’s kind of a side note.

There’s one more thing I’m chewing on, related to families and sex, and it’s the daddy/girl play and the taboo eroticism that keeps families together. But I’m not sure how to express that yet. I’ll keep chewing.

4 Comments | Category: omphaloskepsis | Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

My Father’s Son

Posted on December 3, 2008 in poetry | 26 Comments

The GoatWhen I saw him in September we camped in his family’s cabin. My grandfather built it with his own two hands and gave it to his children; now his own two legs, the prosthetics he got after both were amputated below the knee from diabetes, are the legs of the cabin’s kitchen table.

My two younger sisters and I slept in the cabin’s only room on pillows and dusty weathered couches as Dad woke and stoked the fire. Mornings at the lake are chilly, even at the peak of heat in August when the summer has been baking the water to its depths and swimming is the best. I watched him add kindling and logs and sometimes dozed off. He spread another blanket over me. When I woke I saw a forlorn gaze in his eyes I’ve never seen. What was he thinking? Was he wondering how his oldest daughter evolved into this boy? This big-city dapper masculinity that is too faggy to fit in with him and his brothers and all my older boy cousins as they discuss elaborately the latest football game, the way they fixed their trailers and trucks, what they caught when out fishing, how to clean the geoduck, how to make a perfect sausage-and-egg breakfast for ten, how to put on a wedding, how to give away the bride.

Dad, are you wondering how I got here? How I went from that tree-climbing skinned-knee ragamuffin girl to this prettyboy? From that girl who worked through her teens in your sports card shop, flirting with the boys as my girlfriends came in to seek sanctuary from the juvenile delinquent park hangout across the street when their feelings were hurt, when someone dumped them (again), when they got caught smoking, when they were being sent tomorrow to rehab or summer camp or anorexia camp or gay camp or bible camp.

I never was your tomboy daughter, never got in fights with the boys in the neighborhood, never stood up to the bullies of my younger sisters. I was the artistic one, moody, on my own. Studying my peers as we metamorphosed into our adult bodies.

We used to go on drives sometimes. After dinner restless, this was when neither of us wanted to be home, neither could stomach my mother’s depression. We’d go on drives and this was when you first told me, “I want to open up a store, right there maybe,” pointing at the empty corner lot that used to be a restaurant bar, at the mall on the wharf. “But my dream space,” he whispered, leaning in, “is right by Foodland.”

That was back when we shared our dreams with each other.

It was on one of those drives, too, where he saw a little silver Saab for sale and said, “that’s the kind of car I want to buy you.” I was fourteen and wouldn’t have a license for nearly ten more years. I couldn’t see myself as a driver, just as I couldn’t see myself as a grown woman, a wife, a mother, a panic that plagued my teens.

Recently on a road trip I saw a blue 1970s GTO and remembered some photos from my mom’s college album. “Hard top, 1964,” my dad emailed back. “Midnight blue, the original muscle car. I got it up to 100 easy on the road out to the cabin. I called the car my “Goat.””

Once, I told a lover that I was considering taking T. She had a string of baby trannys, she knew how to break us in over her knee. “You won’t turn into Cary Grant,” she warned me, and stopped at a photo of my father in the hallway. “You’ll turn into him. Look. Is that what you’re thinking you’ll be?”

I didn’t grow up in my father’s footsteps, but suddenly I’ve found myself standing in his shoes.

And now, fifteen years later, he moved his store right next to Foodland, the only grocery store downtown. A prime spot for retail. He has all but retired from the environmental engineering business upon which our family was built and now sorts sports cards, comics, coins from his father’s collection, from when the store opens at noon – so he can sleep in – to six pm, every day except Monday. “I’ve worked enough Mondays for a lifetime,” I’ve heard him say.

Now, fifteen years later, I don’t drive much; I take the subway and taxis but I still miss the stick shift in my hand and the dance of the pedals, just like you taught me. Now fifteen years later I can imagine myself as my father’s grown daughter, this “man” I’ve become, your son.

Three daughters and your wife, our mother, all in one house for nearly half of your life. Did you ever wish you had a son, Dad?

I wonder what he’s thinking, as this fire, his fire, warms our morning. He smiles at me with a look I’ve never seen.

“I sleep just like that,” he says. “With my arm over my eyes. You look just like me.”

26 Comments | Category: poetry | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

8against8: Clare and Jack

Posted on October 27, 2008 in activism, eye candy | 2 Comments

Clare & Jack, September 2008.

Says Clare: “I am wearing a vintage dress and hat from the 30′s (note the vintage strappy heels as well ;), my daughter is wearing a vintage dress from the 50′s and Jack in wearing a super-fly new suit (yum!) . We have some domestic partner benefits here, and we creep closer and closer to legalization every year In Washington state, but we are not legal yet. Hopefully it will move up the coast from California.”

2 Comments | Category: activism, eye candy | Tags: , , , , , , , ,

upon returning, a small complaint

Posted on September 24, 2008 in omphaloskepsis | 17 Comments

I was out of town last week, and now have returned from the other coast, the coast where the sun sets correctly into the water rather than over land, where I was in the Pacific Northwest primarily visiting my very large extended family for five days. I have all sorts of ideas about family and heritage and where I come from, about having kids and having a traditional structure, about how much my sisters and I are the freaks of the family.

Also strange to be referred to as niece, daughter, sister, granddaughter. Those words have never felt so ill-fitting. At some point I went to the bathroom and the door was labeled LADIES and I nearly stopped right there and turned around.

I am not a “lady,” not really. It’s not that I’m necessarily offended by it – I feel lucky to be part of groups of ladies at times, I love that I’m in women’s circles and women’s groups and women’s friendships, but even that word – woman – I’ve never quite felt right about it. I never refer to myself as such.

It’s not that I’m offended by it, it just doesn’t fit. Like too-big clothes or trying to put a hippie in black goth lipstick.

I have a friend who tells childhood stories that always start, “When I was a little girl …” and it struck me when I noticed it that I never refer to myself that way. I’ll say “kid,” as in “when I was a kid.” These days, I say “guy” – “I’m that kind of guy” – when referring to myself. Sometimes I use dyke or queer or butch I suppose, but I don’t ever use woman, lady, girl, or even sister, daughter, niece.

Still, it’s not that I’m transitioning – I’m not – and it’s not that I don’t identify with the lesbian/feminist communities – I do. Maybe I’m too much the poet, too much the semantics theorist, but some of these words just don’t fit.

I suppose this is just one of those frustrating gender binary things, and yet another of the reasons why butch is a trans identity of sorts. And yet another reason why I am still, continuously, inspired to keep doing this work, to understanding gender and creating new language to adequately describe myself and others, to contributing to the community and lifting each other up.

So there was a wedding in the Pacific Northwest, which is what prompted the large paternal family reunion. There are few events that are more gendered than a wedding. I thought it was going to be a small family wedding, as a few of the others had been, but the 20-something family members were actually in the minority and the community of friends and colleagues were abundant. At the church, I got sneered at by the small-town strangers. I was a bit flamboyantly dressed – pink button down, black argyle vest, no tie (I didn’t think it was going to be so formal!). But certainly I was not the only one dressed up, it was a freakin’ wedding!

Just served to remind me that I’m an outsider. I forget that, in New York City, where I don’t generally get noticed walking down the street unless I have a particularly good hair day. I fit in, I don’t stand out really.

The throwing the bouquet / throwing the garter felt like very strong gender-defining moments in the evening. No way in hell I was going to go out there and catch the bouquet – and actually I’m not sure I have ever been to a wedding where one was thrown, now that I think about it. But I did get out there when it was time to throw the garter. I couldn’t stay, though – I was too much on display in a room-full of too many people who had been giving me too many bad looks throughout the day.

I was little more than The Dyke From New York City all weekend.

I’m lucky, I suppose, is what I should take away from that experience – if I lived there, I would not dress as I do, would not have the fun I do with my hair and pink button-downs and vests and ties and belt buckles and cufflinks and jackets. I’m glad I have that opportunity, that I live in a place that not only accepts it, but encourages and, at times, demands it.

I didn’t expect it to be the reason, but really, I came to New York City so I could learn how to dress. Nothing has taught me fashion or style like this place.

Sometimes it is so uncomfortable to not conform to gender roles.

PS: I’m tremendously behind on email and correspondance, forgive me as I catch up.

17 Comments | Category: omphaloskepsis | Tags: , , , , , , , ,

declining politely

Posted on March 28, 2008 in omphaloskepsis | 3 Comments

I saw a girl on the subway this morning so beautiful that I have considered writing a Missed Connections ad on Craigslist:

Red bag, paper cup of coffee, black tank-top, silver necklace, boots with two rows of big buttons marching up the front. Tossing your slightly feathered hair, talking to your friend, then when she got off, you pulled out your compact and began applying face powder, lipgloss. It was such an intimate act, and something about it felt so familiar, like I could see you at your mirror in the morning, getting ready for the day, me pulling my tie through the knot, slipping on my jacket, sipping coffee, pretending to read the paper, legs crossed, at the kitchen table, when really I’m watching you in the reflection of the mirror in the hallway while you’re in the bathroom. And, though perhaps I don’t want to admit it, I felt a little crackle in my chest when I watched you.

Probably it was just my being half-asleep on my commute that gave more meaning to this girl than I would otherwise attach. But this is not the first time this has happened to me lately – I see sudden, recognizable familiarity in a femme and think, maybe that’s her.

I’ve been sleeping awfully this week. Every night, I’m having restless dreams, vivid and sometimes lucid, often full of imagery and messages.

Tuesday night, I dreamt I was stuck in my family’s crypt, a small mosoleum of some sort, which was above ground, walls covered in stained-glass colored mosaic windows. I couldn’t leave this crypt, though there seemed to be some sorts of tours going on, with people in small groups of twos and threes coming in and out. Some of my family was there, my maternal grandmother and her mother, I specifically remember – and things somehow began to turn horrific, and the crypt tourists were zombies, or dripping blood, or other horrible things. I had some sort of perch in a corner, somehow removed, they couldn’t see me, but I was terrified.

I woke myself up at this point, and lulled myself back to sleep only to re-enter right into the same dream, the same crypt. This time, my mother was there, talking to me through the gated door, saying that it was my responsibility, my job, to stay there, that I inhereted this, that it was passed down through generations and all culminated in me.

I awoke feeling that I had remembered something, rather than dreamed something.

Two personal asides: in my astrological chart, I have many planets – Venus, Mars, and Mercury – in the 12th house, and also in the sign of Pisces, which is the 12th house’s natural ruler. The 12th house is often spoken of as the unconscious, and also baggage. In fact, it’s specifically related to family in many ways:

The 12th house may also likely have connections with “family life issues” or “gifts” that our parents (and perhaps our parents’ parents) were given… but they refused or were emotionally unable to give expression to and/or resolve these “family life issues” during their own lifetime. And now it’s been left up to the child (you) to experience and resolve these energies for the parents. (source)

Second aside: I am the fourth generation of first-born daughters. My mother, her mother, and her mother were all the eldest child in their families, and there’s actually a word for that (which I can’t remember or find) and some sort of significance of, again, inheritance.

I spoke with a friend the other day about this, and she said, “The thing is, you don’t have to “inherit” it. You can politely decline the ancestral karmic stuff. It’s not your baggage. You can honor it and honor your ancestors, but it doesn’t have to define your life now. You don’t have to live in a tomb of their making.”

Politely decline.

Decline politely.

Right. If only I could remember that lesson – and, clearly, it is a big one for me. I don’t have to take on everything from everyone, I don’t have to save the world.

I do, however, have to save myself.

3 Comments | Category: omphaloskepsis | Tags: , , , ,