grave humping.

The Best Time I Had Sex in a Cemetery in Broad Daylight
By Kelly McClure

Have you ever played that drinking game where a person says something like, “I’ve never eaten cat food, hee hee,” and if you have in fact eaten cat food, you drink? Well if I were playing that game and someone were like, “I’ve never had naked sex for a million hours on top of a grave, in a cemetery, in broad daylight,” I’d have to chug-a-lug.

A few years ago I met a girl online and we had our second date at a cemetery in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Our first date had started off at a BBQ place in Williamsburg and ended with us slamming each other against someone’s garage door until 6 a.m., so we decided to keep it nice and mellow this time around and have a picnic on top of some dead people.

This girl had stopped at Whole Foods on the way over to pick up a selection of pasta salad, bread, something I don't remember and birch beer, so we sat against a tree eating these things, not having shit-all to say to each other. Then we walked around the cemetery making lame jokes and references to things we would never have said out loud or considered funny in non-uncomfortable situations, and after an hour or so a little buzzer must have gone off in our heads because we started (without saying as much) to look for someplace to make out. We made a beeline for a huge headstone towards the back of the graveyard, and as we were approaching it I dumped my half-full birch beer in a trash can because I was tired of carrying it around. As I did this, my date looked at me with what I can best describe as a “Kathy Bates in Misery” face, and pulled the drink out of the garbage, saying something about how it was expensive. Looking back, this is when I should have run at top speed for the subway, perhaps stopping at 7-11 for a celebatory Snickers to eat on the way home, but no, even in the face of true bat-shittery, the promise of seeing boobies always wins out.

We sat against the huge headstone and made awkward convo about how weird it was that we were able to talk about all sorts of freaky/nasty shit via email and texts, and yet didn’t have a thing to say to each other in person. (Operating at full-capacity, this makes perfect sense and can be explained with the understanding that it’s easy to “open up” and get all turned on talking to someone online because your brain is making them into whoever you want them to be, but when they’re plopped down in front of you, they/you see you/them for the bloated turd that you/they really are.) So yeah, we talked about this for a while, and I stared at my shoe for a few minutes until I said “close your eyes” and started kissing her. Once we were kissing I felt a little more comfortable, and perhaps I became so comfortable that I fell asleep a little bit and didn’t realize that I was allowing someone to remove all my clothing right there in the grass on a sunny afternoon, but there we were: me, my butt cheeks, and the blue, cloudless sky of Brooklyn, like it was truly NBD.

It would be enough to say that I had “a little bit” of sex in a cemetery in broad daylight, and find a way to stretch that into seeming like a normal thing to do, but this went on for hours. Literally a full day. We would take breaks to smoke cigarettes, or to pick at the leftover picnic food, and then go right back into the grave humping. My date broke away at one point to go pee behind a tree, and when she returned she handed me a small white flower that I assumed she had peed on to be kinky. I don’t know why I thought this, and it mayyybe wasn’t true, but given the sort of day we were having, I just figured as much.

The early afternoon turned into late evening, and we got cold from all the being-naked stuff and started gathering up our crap to leave. I couldn’t remember the way to the exit, and the cemetery was humongous, so I came up with the master plan to just walk straight in one direction until we hit a road or a fence or something that signaled “out.” We hit a fence after walking for about 20 minutes, and the opening was locked. All the openings were locked. Having not had a concrete reason to climb a fence in many many years, I was oddly pleased with the opportunity to do so, and proud of myself for being able to clear it without any major injuries. My date required the help of a makeshift ladder of boxes and a clear patch of ground to land upon, but she made it, too.

The minute we left the confines of the cemetery I immediately started feeling like the crustiest ho-bag ever. All I wanted to do was get home ASAP and watch something clean and good like Gossip Girl to make myself feel like myself again. On our path to the subway we DID come across a 7-11, and so I suggested we stop in to buy snacks and use the restroom to assess how insane we looked. There was a line for the restroom and I stood there avoiding eye contact with everyone, straightening my hoodie and casually brushing little twigs and clumps of dirt from my clothing. Once I got into the bathroom and looked in the mirror I realized why everyone in line had been giving me fish eye and whispering to one another: My face was smeared with dirt from ear to ear, my hair looked like every picture you’re ever seen of Nick Nolte, and my neck was one big hickey. Like, the entirety of my neck was a hickey. I zipped up my sweatshirt as high as I could to conceal whatever could be concealed and mentally sunk down low into my safe place until I got home.

Because I am an actual moron, I went on a few more dates with the cemetery girl. I had to eventually cut things off, though, after she house-sat for me while I was out of state and sent me a serious of hysterical text messages threatening to open my mail. When I came home from my trip I crawled around my apartment sniffing all the fabrics, assuming that she had once again (or maybe just for the first time) peed on something.

I lol'ed. Also, I've been reading The Hairpin a lot lately like there isn't enough ladynews in my life already.

pretty

Too cute not to reblog.
Indulge me a little bit.
I've got some original content posts coming up soon. Some sewing projects and the like, just been too sick to write anything creative lately.

greatness

'"IN honor of Persephone!” she announced, cracking open a pinkish orb. She handed me half and I stared, shocked, at the gleaming maroon seeds. She was plucking them with abandon, letting the juice stain her fingers, not caring. I tried to breathe.

It was winter in Pittsburgh, I was 18 years old, and I had never seen a pomegranate. I’d met her weeks after arriving in Pittsburgh for college. Somewhat randomly her boyfriend had asked me: “Would you like to come to our party? We’re going to have this Balkan band from Albuquerque and a Norwegian folk singer play, an Indonesian shadow puppet performance, and everyone has to bring a pie.”

At a time when other freshman girls were comparing Wal-Mart dorm room décor and giggling over tipsy messages scribbled on hallway wipe boards, an invitation to an off-campus party with artsy 20-somethings was surreal. I went, terrified, hoping at best to merely glimpse the Bohemian lifestyle my run-of-the-mill suburban upbringing had undoubtedly denied me. Instead, I fell in love.

She was a poet living in a castle-like apartment flooded with plants and books I’d never heard of. The details of her exotic childhood, I learned, included an organic farm in rural Texas and a private girls’ school. She did origami and left it hidden for strangers to find, knew the secrets of library basements and overgrown alleyways, and wore vintage hats covered in rusty brooches. She was into queer theory. She got her clothes from the Goodwill Dumpster. She was everything I’d dreamed of but never knew existed.

For some reason she anointed me with her doting approval and took to showing me around the city. She was on a mission to soak up the magic humming just beyond the ordinary and needed a partner in crime.

Enamored, I dropped everything to distance myself from the banality of university life and tag along. I was still very much 18: In my free time I accidentally dated the wrong people (sweet yet mortal music-theory undergrads), went to the wrong parties (where punks pounded Pabst Blue Ribbon) and actually went to class.

She disapproved, but she was patient and mentored me lovingly with carefully crafted book lists and midnight adventures. A year after we’d met, just as I was getting a handle on Ursula K. Le Guin and Anne Carson, she called me: Would I like her bicycle? She’d bought a one-way ticket to Japan.

The only person more devastated than me was her suddenly ex-boyfriend. Our common heartbreak inexplicable to the outside world, he and I mourned together. Only we knew the depths of her enchantment and, thus, the tragedy of our loss. While I sent her letter after letter, he actively plotted to get her back. In one hopeless ploy, he reasoned that if the two of us could lure her into a three-way relationship, our combined appeal might jointly win her over.

At 19 this seemed plausible to me and I went for it, pawing at him in the dark, remembering her. After he’d fall asleep I’d sit in their living room and trace my finger over the books she’d left behind. I ached in the presence of her ghost. Eventually he also took a one-way flight to Japan in an attempt to reunite; soon he was wandering through India without her. And I was left in Pittsburgh, newly alone.

With everyone I deemed important now abroad, I mustered up my newly developed confidence and hatched my own plan: I too would study in Japan and properly declare my love once and for all. When I marched to my university’s study-abroad office to seal the deal, however, I was confronted with reality: Living in Japan was expensive. Prohibitively expensive.

But there was a six-week summer program in Beijing, for which generous scholarships existed. Would I be interested in that? I glanced at the map. China seemed close enough. I applied.

By June I was at Peking University studying Mandarin on an open-jaw airline ticket; six weeks later the program ended and I was standing in Tiananmen Square. And to my disbelief she was there, too, standing next to me, flying a makeshift kite. By then she had quit her Japanese job and come to Beijing with her teenage brother. Her plan was for the three of us to take the Trans-Siberian Railway to Moscow and sort of wing it from there.

Still getting my bearings abroad, I was not yet the type of person who “wings it” — especially in Russia — but this wasn’t about logic; this was about her.

She slept a lot on the train; she also read for hours and barely ate. I bonded with her brother over spoonfuls of Nutella and ruthless make-believe gossip about our fellow passengers. We got to the topic of her ex-boyfriend.

“She only liked him because they read at the exact same pace and turned pages at the same time,” her brother said, rolling his eyes. “Not exactly my idea of romance.”

I swooned at the thought of her reading something undoubtedly wonderful in the adjoining compartment but forced myself to nod. We looked out the window: a herd of camels, for a flash of a second. We were in the Gobi Desert.

Nights were hard. She was inevitably inches away, sleeping peacefully as my desire for her boiled. In Ulan Bator, under a sky thick and white with stars, we decided to sleep in a yurt on the steppe. As her brother slept, she whispered to me: “Have you heard about that hand-built, nine-grotto Virgin Mary shrine some priest spent 42 years piecing together in Iowa?”

I told her I’d build her a bigger one if she wanted.

She laughed and played with my hair, knowing it was true but not wanting to show it. The shrine I had already built for her was painfully exposed; in two years my mainstream existence had been razed to the ground to make room for a garden in which her every eccentricity was welcomed to bloom. What was I doing in Mongolia? It seemed I would follow her anywhere.

The landscape changed as we rode to Russia: an endless expanse of pine trees, one after another, through the train windows. We stopped in Irkutsk to skinny-dip with seals in Lake Baikal, eat spiced pine nuts from the cone, and hike through fields to hunt for mushrooms and shamanistic cave drawings, but I barely noticed. While staying with a family, our kindly Russian host mother instructed us to strip and smack each other with birch branches in a backyard sauna. This is where we finally did kiss, under an orange moon, but her heart was elusive while mine was unsophisticated and greedy.

In the four days it took to ride from Irkutsk to Moscow she somehow found us a place to stay: an office-building basement secretly converted at night into a cheap hostel by a cleaning lady. The catch was that we had to be out each morning by 8.

We whiled our days away in bookstores and second-rate amusement parks, eating hot dogs and forgetting to go to the Kremlin. When she and her brother decided to ditch the train and hitchhike their way through Finland and the Baltic states — all the way to relatives in France — I suddenly felt like an impostor about to be discovered. I wanted to keep going but couldn’t keep up.

I was too afraid not to return to Pittsburgh, not to finish college, not to tell my parents exactly where I was. I didn’t have much money and was too afraid to hitch. She seemed genuinely sad but did not stop me from leaving. As I turned my back on her at the first major fork in the road, I was grudgingly conscious of a painful realization: My life was not one of one-way tickets. Not yet.

OVER the next few years she passed through Pittsburgh many times and we’d always go swimming in a fountain, or stencil poetry onto sidewalks, or cook pizza or kiss, only for a day or two, and then she’d be gone. I’d beg for her ever-changing address and she’d write, inconsistently, sending short stories and watercolors too good to be from someone I knew. One day she showed up with a new boyfriend. The only thing worse than losing her was the realization that I’d never had her.

Recently I came across her biography online. She is now an accomplished writer, the recipient of many fellowships and awards. My first thought: Thank God professional judges of the potential for magic in artists have justified my fanatic obsession. And then I saw it. Among her various honors and residencies, chosen out of the hundreds of cities she has visited and thousands of experiences accumulated, she had written that she once flew kites in Tiananmen Square.

I tried to breathe. There are so many fruits in the world; we can’t remember exactly who introduced us to what. But we never forget who showed us that there were, indeed, more fruits to discover than we’d ever realized.'

This story has everything I like: adventure, three-way relationships, unrequited girl crushes.
Haven't we all had a crush on this girl? I want to be this girl and be with her.
Via.

hello HK.

'I can't help it that I'm so popular.'

Via.

home.

Alison Bechdel. Fun Home.
Reading this right now. Amazing.
Have to get my hands on a hard copy real soon.

so if you're pretty, i sign titties.

I love Nicki. She's such a BAMF. I guess I'm just one of those girls, falling like dominoes for her.
'Say my shoe game nuts, so I call 'em cashews
Every other city there's another Nicki tattoo
Steal Wayne girls, I steal Drake girls
You know the real bitches love me fuck the fake girls
So if you pretty, I sign titties
I got the key to every motherfuckin' city'

Fuck that 'Do It Like a Dude' song, this is the lesbian anthem.

youth

The staggering amount of queer homeless youth living on the streets is a problem, not only in LA but in our city too.
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/dec/12/local/la-me-gay-homeless-20101212

Frankie

Just started watching Lip Service tonight, already hooked. Why is Frankie so hot?
Also secondly and hilariously, I changed my Facebook status to 'is watching Lip Service on the day of the birth of Christ. Thank you Jesus!' and all my mom's Christian friends 'liked' it, so awkward, I guess they don't know it's a show about gasp! Lesbians! Oh the irony.

Lindsay Lohan

Had a rather exciting sex dream about Lindsay Lohan last night, probably because I watched this clip before I went to bed.
Is it wrong I find her coked out mannerisms rather enticing and likable?

*It's clip #4 on the link, although I recommend you watch them all, they are all highly enjoyable.

love

'The brain may take advice, but not the heart, and love, having no geography, knows no boundaries: weight and sink it deep, no matter, it will rise and find the surface: and why not? Any love is natural and beautiful that lies within a person's nature; only hypocrites would hold a man responsible for what he loves, emotional illiterates and those of righteous envy, who, in their agitated concern, mistake so frequently the arrow pointing to heaven for the one that leads to hell.'

Truman Capote 'Other Voices, Other Rooms'
Via Obia.

Nan Goldin

1.Sharon nursing Cookie on her bed, Provincetown, Massachusetts, USA, 1989.
Like Cookie, Sharon was for many years a familiar subject in Goldin's photography. Her masculine beauty often made a perfect counterbalance to Cookie's exuberant and extremely feminine sensuality. This photograph, from the Cookie portfolio, catches these ex-lovers at a tragic time, marked by the progress of the illness that in a matter of months would cut short Cookie's life. It was Sharon who would nurse Cookie through the months when she could no longer even speak, even though the photograph on the wall testifies to Cookie's marriage to a man, after eight years as Sharon's lover.
2. Variety Booth, New York City, 1983.
3. Smoky car, New Hampshire, USA, 1979.
Inconsequential daily events, situations with no particular story behind them and the anonymity of repeated gestures (like smoking a cigarette or drinking a beer) ofter catch Goldin's eye. This shot turns on the contrasts between light and shade, interior and exterior. It shows a moment suspended in time and captures, as many of her images do, a sense of solitude and estrangement, even within a pleasure-filled situation.

synthetic family

Nan Goldin. Picnic on the Esplande, Boston, USA, 1973.
This photograph, among the first Goldin made in colour, shows many of the features that made her one of the first and foremost exponents of the snapshot aesthetic. This Easter picnic by the river in Boston shows Goldin's 'family' at the time, one of the happiest periods in her life. She was living with a group of drag queens, her heroines, and had already amassed a huge body of black-and-white photographs of them. It shows her lifelong obession with social rituals an the pleasures of communal life. Over time she would lose many people in this group to AIDS and drug addiction.

Excerpt from the seriously wonderful Nan Goldin book Lindsay got me, thanks Lindsay, I think you're the best.

six

I haven't been posting as much this month, sorry! Mostly it's because I've been getting stoned and watching Six Feet Under for the majority of October. I finally finished the series, so now it's back to life as normal a slacker.
But, the show is seriously amazing, the characters are all so lovingly developed and it probably contains the most awesome and beyond stereotypical* LGBT characters to ever grace our televisions.

*I say this because I watched ANTM for the first time in a long time tonight, and if I didn't know better I would think that all gay men were only into dressing and acting flamboyantly and that girls are only lesbians because they were all sexually abused as 11 year olds.

purple

Untitled (plum and dark brown). Mark Rothko, 1964.
Don't forget to wear purple tomorrow today to show your support for LGBT kids who have or are being bullied.

It Gets Better

It Gets Better is a video project started by advice columnist Dan Savage in response to Billy Lucas — an Indiana teenager who killed himself after being bullied by his classmates for being gay. The video is really sweet, Dan Savage's family is so cute, I had no idea he had a son, who is so adorable by the way. Also, props to them for starting this project, there's already so many It Gets Better videos posted by other users, it really does seem like a great resources for kids who may otherwise not be able to find support.

In Dan Savage's own words:

"I wish I could have talked to this kid for five minutes. I wish I could have told Billy that it gets better. I wish I could have told him that, however bad things were, however isolated and alone he was, it gets better.

But gay adults aren't allowed to talk to these kids. Schools and churches don't bring us in to talk to teenagers who are being bullied. Many of these kids have homophobic parents who believe that they can prevent their gay children from growing up to be gay—or from ever coming out—by depriving them of information, resources, and positive role models.

Why are we waiting for permission to talk to these kids? We have the ability to talk directly to them right now. We don't have to wait for permission to let them know that it gets better. We can reach these kids."

TIFF

There are two films I really want to see for TIFF this year, the first one is All About Love by the acclaimed Hong Kong New Wave director Ann Hui, she is well known for her directorial work in Night and Fog, Boat People and The Way We Are. Hui's new film is about two queer women in Hong Kong, how could I not support that? It's pretty groundbreaking and gutsy considering how conservative Hong Kong culture is and the fact that the film won't be able to be distributed in China as they have a ban on films dealing with gay subject matter.
The second film is !Women Art Revolution - A Secret History, it's "filmed over four decades, this inspiring cultural history tracks the struggles and breakthroughs of women artists from Judy Chicago to Guerilla Girls to Miranda July and more".

kids

Saw The Kids Are Alright tonight, it's awesome. Go see it. Plus there's Deerhoof on the soundtrack!
Also, isn't this poster awesome?

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