What I’m Reading
For many reasons—not the least of which is that they have devoted an entire section to books about sex work and written by sex workers—my favorite bookstore is Bluestockings Cooperative in New York City.
In an attempt to support them in their mission of being a sustainable radical space (and also to branch out and read books that I don’t naturally gravitate toward!) I joined their monthly book club, where they send me a new selection every month.
This month they sent a graphic novel: Squire by Sara Alfageeh and Nadia Shammas. The story is of a poor young woman, Aiza, who dreams of joining the military and becoming a Knight, with the hope of gaining full citizenship.
Admittedly, I have read very few graphic novels in my life; I am so unfamiliar with the genre that I feel ill-equipped to comment on the book! Graphic novels themselves overwhelm me because I am not sure how to read them or what to pay attention to: the graphics, the story, the dialogue? all of it? at the same time?!
And yet, this story captured my attention and resonated with me, enough that I read it in one sitting while drinking my coffee this morning.
If you are planning on reading the book and don’t like spoilers, feel free to skip this, but it is impossible for me to reflect on the book without talking about the decision Aiza made in the end.
When Aiza joins the military she isn’t taken seriously because of her size and station in life, yet her determination to overcome these obstacles leads her to becoming a hero, elevating her to the level of Squire.
Yet, the more entrenched she becomes in the culture that she (literally) fought her way into, the more she starts to question whether her goals were worthwhile in the first place. In a moment of clarity she says, “There were no heroes here. We were chewed up and spit out and almost became a part of something terrible.”
I think that it is very common for ambitious people to become disillusioned once they have “made it” (whatever that means for them). For Aiza, she realized she was fed a pipedream, and that in the process of chasing that dream, she ended up fighting for an unjust regime.
In the end, when she and her friends decide to run away, one of her friends says, “Wasn’t it Aiza who said that deserters were losers and quitters?”
Aiza closes the book out with, “Yeah, well… I guess I’m a quitter.”
What I’m Thinking About
This story was powerful for me because I also walked away from a life that I had worked very hard to build: 7 years into graduate school and 16 years into a marriage, I left both when I realized that neither were what I thought they would be; when I realized I was working toward a life I no longer wanted. Part of what made these decisions hard is that I was afraid of what it would say about me if I were unable to finish what I started: Would I be a loser and a quitter? Would my life be a failure?
The fear of failure has caused me to cling to projects, goals, and lifestyles long after I should have let them go. For this reason, over the course of the last several years, I have worked on changing my narrative around failure. One of the tools that has helped me do this is Jack Halberstam’s book The Queer Art of Failure.
Indeed, Halberstam says that embracing queerness offers a lens for reimagining failure. “Queerness offers the promise of failure as a way of life,” he says. This would prove to be the case for me, not because I actually did fail, but because I realized that the things I had been so intent on succeeding at were not for me, and that this was okay.
“Being taken seriously means missing out on the chance to be frivolous, promiscuous, and irrelevant,” Halberstam suggests. “The desire to be taken seriously is precisely what compels people to follow the tried and true paths of knowledge production.” The tried and true path wasn’t the one that I was ultimately interested in.
The detours into frivolity, promiscuity, and irrelevance ushered me into a world of people like me. Smart and thoughtful people, clawing their way out of poverty against great odds, using all the tools at their disposal, including their femininity and their sexuality.
I would know that I had found my people when I would see sex worker and writer Lorelei Lee post on Twitter, “I didn’t always want to be a sex worker, but I did always want to be in a secret club of women who slay with their brains and tits so…”
And slaying with tits and brains is something I learned to do—one failure at time—until all of those failures added up to a life I wanted to live.
What I’m Excited About
I’ve missed the last couple of postings because I’ve been very busy! I just came back from a wonderful trip to New York where I got to spend time with so many people I love!
I went to Moulin Rouge on Broadway, as well as a delightful and whacky burlesque show. I ate great food, had sweet chats, and took long walks. It was a perfect fall experience in NYC!
Right now I am hunkering down in Pittsburgh for a bit and refocusing on my writing, which is a nice change of pace.
I’m really excited that a friend and colleague of mine, Kaytlin Bailey, will be in Pittsburgh this month to perform her one woman show, A Whore’s Eye View, at The Government Center in the Northside. Pittsburgh folks should come, you won’t regret it!
I also did a very fun and artistic photo shoot last week that involved lots of metallic body paint. More pics to come.
Availability & Booking
Buffalo, NY: October 15-16
Akron, OH: November 1-2
Boston, MA: November 11-14
Pittsburgh in between
My travel calendar is kept up to date on my website.
