"Can you have sex?"
When Your Body Doesn't Come with Boundaries
I’m pleased to say that no total stranger has approached me with the opening line, “Can you have sex?” but I am not pleased to say that my friend Teal Sherer, a blond and beautiful badass actress who uses a wheelchair, has been approached with this precise charming question, and made it into a brief but poignant scene in an episode of the 2010 webseries, My Gimpy Life. (See, pretty girls with visible disabilities aren’t supposed to exist, so they get a whole different pile of shit from strangers than people who don’t register as ‘pretty girl.’ Beauty can be its own handicap, as far as basic respect is concerned.)
I’ve only been asked if I could have sex while I was in the throes of a trauma-related actual-mental-breakdown, which actually, itself, had nothing to do with disability (I don’t get paid enough for these musings to go into what all that was about). But unfortunately for my place in the world, I never look more classically-crippled, I’m talking disabled as it’s generally conceived of in the popular imagination, than when I’m mentally escaping some deep internal chaotic-bad. I once posted to an online forum about dissociation and asked if it affected anyone else’s looks, but no one there knew what I was talking about. “I guess I sometimes get a kind of out of it look in my eyes,” someone said, “but I don’t think it’s noticeable unless you’re really staring at me up close.” So I’m on my own here with the way I throw off my own already complicated gait, and the way my voice slows down, and the way my eyes suddenly turn into frog eyes, if I’m deeply triggered on a psychological level that feels pretty damn neruological when it’s happening. And a breakdown, a real one, the kind that’s way too fucking gnarly for a memoir, because no one who isn’t an actual sadist could possibly want to read it, that kind of breakdown? takes its time. It didn’t last days, it lasted months. I started to forget what I normally look like, and I had a particularly observant group of 10th-grade students who definitely forgot that they had once been compelled to treat me with some level of basic respect. Typically, kids don’t make fun of disability, not unless they’re really trying to set fire to you. Before I spent my first-and-last year in education I worked as a substitute for two years in urban and rural districts around California and I can tell you, with a full-body exhale of relief, that mocking disability has fallen out of fashion at last.
But we all know what comes with a particularly kind of marginalized-person-mockery falling out of fashion: a silent consensus that if someone does dare whip out that bigoted sword, shit will get very exciting. So I wasn’t even shocked when a student I have a lot of respect for limped across the room in a pretty spot-on impression of how I walk when I’m not fully there. I didn’t even say anything, because I was not very functional at that particular time: I just stared. One of my students laughed uproariously, because this imitator is a talented-as-fuck performer. She comes from a very religious background and she exclaimed, “You’re going to hell!” but of course, going to hell for making fun of a body like mine doesn’t mean said body should be respected.
“Do you have sex?” she asked me.
The short answer is yes, yes I do, I enjoy basically everything and a lot of things that some people believe I shouldn’t, or “girls don’t,” or however you want to sum up the sex-obsessed yet aggressively Puritanical trashfire that amounts to discourse on any of this in most of America. But that default/normative/“correct” kind of sex that’s the one where babies come from? I love it, but I’ve only done it a handful of times and I didn’t start until I was 30 because I didn’t know I loved it because it hurt like hell until that one time, and the reason for the pain is not physical, it’s mental, but I do have a ton of scar tissue nearby because of these symmetrical scars on each of my inner thighs that for whatever reason were necessary to make in order to lengthen my congenitally tight hamstrings when I was little and so do I have sex? It depends on your definition and how attached you are to the reproductive aspect, and of course even if I could come up with an accurately succinct answer to this question, I’m not sure how appropriate it would be for 10th graders.
“Sex involves positions,” she continued. “How can YOU do positions?”
Well, that’s a good question, actually. See the real answer is that I had a theatrically awkward moment with an old-school and as I remember it really attractive and far, far older proudly dykey physical therapist who asked me what my goals are, because that’s one of the first things physical therapists have to ask you, and in huge-kink-scene-but-still-really-awkward-and-uptight-to-the-core-Seattle I got to say, “Well, my hip muscles are really tight so I can’t spread my legs as far as would be comfortable during sex, can I work on that?”
In the ensuing years, I’ve worked on that, so how do I do positions? “WITH EFFORT, CHILD, but the effort is worth it, as you may or may not well know.” I didn’t say that, obviously, and not just because my sex drive had gone out the door hand-in-hand with my will to live. How WOULD I answer that question for 10th graders? Doesn’t matter, because if I ever walk into an American high school again it will be as a visiting writer. Education is a nightmare field when you’re me, even though there’s nothing I value more passionately than the insights, observations, and general struggles-and-triumphs of teenagers.
Concentrating on the ‘disabled person’ aspect of being me when writing about sex never feels weird unless I’m doing it for an audience, but I usually am doing it for an audience, because I’ve been writing no-holds-barred erotica for audiences since I was seventeen. But at seventeen I was unaware of the number of people who don’t believe I can or should have an erotic life, and if they’re walking by and decide that they find me attractive, they always tell me so, with surprise. “Aren’t YOU beautiful!” a woman in Salinas said to me once. I didn’t say anything to her. When guys say it, I always say, “I know,” or, “I get that a lot,” because my sense is that guys assume I don’t get it ever, and that’s exactly why I get it a lot. Not that beauty or hotness is related in any way to the amount of sex a person has. But it’s almost funny, looking back, that the one sustained period of my life during which my somewhat-notorious sex drive didn’t exist was the one time I was ever grilled about what my relationship to sex is. “It’s complicated” is probably the single objectively-useful phrase English has to offer, but that won’t pacify students who are simultaneously curious and in the mood to take revenge on you because, understandably, they’ve mistaken your balls-out mental breakdown as apathy. It looks a lot like apathy. And that’s to say, if any of your friends’ kids shows you a video on Snapchat of a redheaded teacher in a dress she hated wearing staring blankly into space while a classroom gets more and more chaotic, that teacher did not hate her job, that teacher did not hate her kids. She was not okay (but, for the curious, she is now).
Kids did a good job of convincing me that I had become Instagram/Snapchat famous as someone who showed up to work and did absolutely nothing, and I spent quite a few nights genuinely worried that I would get contacted by the local news. A schoolwide petition to fire me involved an admirable amount of effort not just on the part of serious-activist gen-z students but also on the part of a teacher who believed that my behavior stemmed from racism. It was a rollicking good time for all, is the best way to wrap that part up.
That dress I mentioned, the one I hated wearing, is actually a dress I own in several different colors. I bought them for two reasons: 1.) a teacher would totally wear them, to the point that I’m not quite sure who the hell else does and 2.) I was determined to keep my tattoo covered at work, even though I live in a Cool Place where several teachers and the principal had visible tattoos. They’re arm tattoos though, whereas mine, as my father would tell you in loud and near-tearful dismay if he were here, takes up “the whole upper-left quadrant of [my] chest” and can’t even be seen fully if I’m not topless. This is an exaggeration; I own plenty of tops with necks cut just low enough that you can see the whole damn thing without issue, but when I was 22 and had just gotten that ink done, I thrilled at the thought of being someone who lived such a relentlessly sexual life (I still do) and I said, with a particular nonchalance that was designed to needle him, “Well not everyone gets to see the whole thing, Dad.” My tone definitely implied that “not everyone” still included a fuckton of people.
So, do I have sex? Well, kind of a personal question, right? I shouldn’t really answer that in public, right? I mean I’ve been asked, but you didn’t ask.
If no stranger has come up to you on the street and posed this question, be grateful that your body comes with boundaries that the world doesn’t leave it to you to carve out. Not that shaping our own boundaries with regards to physical pleasure and comfort isn’t a lifelong thing, but some of you are granted a reasonable foundation and you can leave the carving-out to chosen moments with potential sex partners whereas others of us have to remind the adoring public that we’re not fucking exhibitions at the Worlds Fair. Maybe this is why I actually get a lot of energy from nude performance, particularly if no one in the audience is expecting to see as much as I’m about to show: If I’m going to be inherently on display no matter what I do out there, then I at least want to be in charge of where their shock comes from.