I heard it said of Hildegard of Bingen that she was prone to great sicknesses until she spoke of her visions. Then she recovered. The commentator said, “It is our secrets that make us sick.” And I remember someone who was ill everyday and kept a bottle of pills with him. He thought, “It is because I am smoking that I am always sick.” But I think it was the other way around. The lies and secrets he held onto, the visions he would not explore built up and built up and made him heal. Of Von Bingen it was said that her writing and her creativity became her health.
That is how it was with me. Toni Morrison revealed that the reason she wrote was because if she didn’t, then she would die. Coming out of college I found this same urgency. It was really a matter of life and death. I write down visions and voices because I must. Not writing them they build up and I am ill.
For the Queer, for the Woman, for the priest and priestess writing is not the cerebral thing that Americans, predominately American men, predominately American white men have made it out to be. A think of reason. It is utterly a visceral experience. It comes out of the body, from the bowels. Storytelling is a bloody business. Helene Cixous once told of a woman who came up to her and told her of the kingdoms, the imaginary worlds she formed through, yes, masturbation. Cixous wished the woman would develop those worlds, write of them. This seems strange to a straight man or maybe straight people in general. That world is based on a sort of dissatisfaction. You are half of something.
The White Life Books are permeated with masturbation not only because they are about five young men, but because they are about self exploration. I don’t care what straight people say—I REALLY DON’T CARE WHAT STRAIGHT PEOPLE SAY—someone who is afraid to touch his own body, who treats that with disdain is disdaining himself and lives without accurate self knowledge. My aunt used to cook chitterlings—pig intestines for Thanksgiving—and with good reason I didn’t eat them and certainly didn’t touch them. And there is a good reason for steering clear of certain places near where you live. But to treat your body like a chitterling or like a bad neighborhood you’d rather not visit…. That is a sad thing. From the exploration comes all the true knowledge of what we really are, what we really want, which is why I say that though we may have tons and tons of books on Queer Study we don’t have anything on straights because, as of yet, for the most part, they themselves do not know what they are.
I was talking to my friend and he said that masturbation couldn’t be as good as sex. But of course he was thinking like a straight man. If you have been taught that sex with a woman is the best thing you can have and touching yourself is a very distant second then of course it will be. And straightness hinges on the fact that you must find a body unlike your own and it will make you happy. When straight men talk about sex it ends up, “She said it was great. She said I gave her eight”—it is always eight, I don’t know why—“consecutive orgasms.” In my book the sex that someone else has to tell you is good does not matter.
Women and Queers often talk about the fact that being with yourself can be better than being with someone else and I know that I wasn’t with Ben for this very reason. As far as we got I knew I could please myself better and be happier in my own company. When we lie down with ourselves we have the body we desire already and are exploring it, not running from it, not thinking it isn’t good enough unless someone of the opposite gender is pleasuring it. Straight men rely on the chance to learn a woman’s body. When Ben decided he was straight he couldn’t help telling me all about the birth control the girl he was with was using, how strange her body was…. How disinterested I was, and how sad it was that he didn’t know his own and probably didn’t find it very lovable. But every creative work I have done has come, believe it or not, from some corner, some overturned place in the labyrinths of my body, some wet place hitherto unexplored, and that I was afraid to explore. I approach my body and my blank screen for writing the same way the prophets approached God… with fear and trembling.
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