PS054 - Another Dance Around The Sun

Nov 18

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Episodes: https://shows.acast.com/660e243b2f834f0017de9181/episodes/660e2440acbcaf00174d9929

As we move towards the end of November, Lee reflects upon his birthday, life journeys, ageism and passion. From life travels to life transformations, gender exploration to finding his place beyond the safe bubbles, this podcast is a chance to not only learn about Lee himself, but find ideas about how we each move through the world.

Announcer:
BDSM and non-standard relationships, power exchange and polyamory, sacred sexuality and fetishes, as well as simply fun kink.

You're listening to the Erotic Awakening Podcast Network.

Welcome to The Passion And Soul Podcast, an exploration of personal and interpersonal desire, faith and connection.

Your host, international sexuality and spirituality author and educator, Lee Harrington of passionandsoul.com, will take you on a sultry and intellectual journey through the soul of intimate experience.

Take a moment and breathe deep, and get ready for an adventure.

This podcast is a chance to glimpse into the ever increasing diverse world of alternative life.

The Passion And Soul Podcast is intended for mature audiences.

If you are offended by adult topics or prohibited by law, we recommend you stop listening right now.

Lee:
Hello, fellow adventurers of sexuality and spirit, and welcome to the Passion And Soul Podcast with Lee Harrington of passionandsoul.com.

Now, as we creep up into for those in America for Thanksgiving and to what is considered the holiday season for many folks, I myself have already started my holiday season as somebody who is an enthusiastic believer in honoring those that have passed to the other side when we look at Al Jalos Eve and Dia de los Muertos.

But I am excited coming into right now because for those who don't know, my birthday is the day after American Thanksgiving.

And I mean, it moves around.

Every seven years or so, my birthday falls on Thanksgiving.

So when I was growing up, I actually didn't get a birthday cake most of the time.

I got a pumpkin pie with candles put in it.

And I have a deep connection emotionally with the taste of pumpkin for that reason, whether it's pumpkin curry or pumpkin crepes or, you know, whatever it might be, pumpkin pie homemade especially by my mother or grandmother.

Part of this time of year for me is, it's a really conflicted piece because I find my age fascinating.

And yes, today's rambling is going to be about my journey, but also about age and experience and its place in sexuality populations.

I think we're gonna wander a bit over into some of the different careers I've had over the years, which is likely going to meander into the world of gender.

So those are the likely places we will go.

We'll see where this adventure takes us though.

Having these reflections around the holiday and around growing up, I have a chance to reflect back on growing up.

I'm not a big person who has big birthday parties.

It's not been my thing.

In fact, I've taught on my birthday a number of times in the kink community and personally choose not to tell people that I'm teaching on November 28th and that it somehow matters because it doesn't necessarily matter to me.

I am excited to get to dance around the sun one more time.

And I'm glad to be taking another full breath of air, grateful that I am still alive because there are times when I wonder how that is still the case with some of the mishaps and adventures I have had along the way.

This year, I am turning 35 based on the calendar that we use that states that once I have been breathing for a full year, I am considered one.

There are other cultures that consider one to be starting at the first moment of breath.

But I'm 35 years old this year.

And I've had people say, well, you know, are you really going to talk about this this week?

And the answer is yes, because I think we're going to have an interview next week, and I'm going to roll with the punches that way.

But I'm 35 years old, and I've been involved for the kink community for well over half my life since 1996.

And so I had this really fascinating experience talking with a friend of mine, Zahaava, who just recently moved to the Bay Area.

She runs an amazing program called Love Making Dances.

Her specialty is in dance, but also in Erotic Awakening, which is to play off a little bit off the Erotic Awakening Podcast.

But that's a big piece of her work is somatic understanding, body consciousness, awareness of how we are invested in our being, as well as physiological techniques for moving bodies, specializing in work with women, for women, by women.

And she recently moved from New York to San Francisco.

We were discussing the idea of bubbles, this notion that in New York, finding people who got what we were doing, who understood body consciousness, who understood gender theory, who understood kink and sexuality and awareness and open relationship discourses, that you had to find these tiny little bubbles amidst this giant sea of unknowingness.

But having moved to San Francisco, her journey now states that that is not the case anymore, that amongst the people she is surrounded by, the bulk of them know what kink.com is.

The bulk of them know what dark odyssey surrender is.

That they have a consciousness around this stuff and that she is living in a bubble, not a tiny little bubble.

And this is a lot of my language, not necessarily hers.

But that idea that we are all in these little bubbles, well, I have gone in the opposite direction.

I have spent the bulk of my life traveling in and between and through bubbles.

My chain of bubbles has purposefully been crafted in such a way that I haven't had to leave it.

That when I went to the south, I spent very little time in the south, as it were.

I saw the south, I passed by the south, but I went from bubble to bubble.

I went from the foundry in Little Rock through the folks at Heifer International, which is its own form of consciousness bubble, wove my way over to wandering through beautiful foresty swamp areas, wandered over to Memphis while eating amazing food.

It was bubble to bubble to bubble.

These places of awareness and consciousness and beauty that I never had my feet really touch the ground in a way that wasn't still protected in some way, even when I went to the Japanese internment camp, even when I went to the World War II Museum, I was still walking with people or by myself in a way that was coming from my own level of, my own vibration if we want to call it new age language, but with my own perspective.

But living in Alaska in the past year, I've become incredibly conscious of how much I am no longer in that bubble.

That I am not in a place where gender queerness or notions of trans rights or those sorts of things are just part of the discourse of who I am around.

True, there are tiny little bubbles here and there, but when the entirety of the kink community, that I can name most of the names of people who regularly show up at kink events, it's like, wow, that's fascinating to me because that didn't used to happen, it didn't used to be how I wandered in the world, that I was moving between bubble to bubble and now I am in a different place.

And it was really fascinating to reflect when I was having dinner with somebody in the theater community here in Alaska last night, that he's a gay guy and he was talking about how in this community for men who have sex with men, that there are certain types that are popular and other types of bodies and activities that aren't popular.

And if you're not part of one of those major populations, you got to work with whoever you're working with.

And that even those bubbles are so much smaller.

And that's not to say these bubbles are appropriate and not say that they're idyllic in any way, because they're not.

Our community eats its own.

Our communities eat their own.

Right?

We live in a world where outing happens.

We live in communities where, you know, exes are angry with one another.

It's not a perfect...

It's not a sort of utopia.

It's a core sampling.

But the likelihood of me, as Reid Mihalko would state it, fucking within my own species, was more likely to happen, where that was who I could surround myself with.

And that's not to say the bulk of the people that I encounter are bad in any way, shape or form.

No, I have been blown away by the beauty that, you know, that has appeared around me in so many different ways.

But even, you know, having more blue as compared to red leanings when it comes to politics, it can be rebellious and radical here in Alaska, though I think it's interesting that our state tends to have lots of Republican politics, and yet we just approve pot legalization.

So, whatever it is.

But when I reflect back on my life, here I am at 35.

And as a note, I get really confused about that age sometimes.

I really do.

My brain thinks that I should be somewhere in my early 40s.

But when I look back on it, I'm able to look at the fact that at the age of four, I was in a bubble programming computers, right?

Playing on my Commodore 64 and figuring out how to run systems.

That I was then surrounded and in pullout programs with kids who were doing multiple languages and people who were doing advanced mathematics at the age of seven.

That one of my classmates in elementary school, I remember that he ended up getting an internship with NASA at the age of 14.

That this was the population that I was surrounded by.

That I was in a bubble.

And I went from there into being in that bubble while simultaneously also in the sci-fi and sci-fi fantasy communities.

Another bubble.

My bubbles layered on top of each other.

That I've gone from there into being part of the queer and kink populations.

Being part of queer consciousness on a street punk level at the age of 13 and then moving into private kink explorations and then public kink explorations.

And that in doing so, I have been surrounded by choice, but also not entirely by choice.

Sometimes through a lack of consciousness in my part that I have been in a bubble.

But it's been an interesting wake up call in the last year, because I moved up here a little over a year ago.

It's been an interesting awakening for me how much of bubble, how much of my life I have lived in such bubbles.

That I literally, when I went to a Halloween party recently, didn't understand that me wearing a men's corset, and I mean tailored for a men's body with the flat top, only goes up two thirds up the torso, that I was wearing a classically tailored leather, but classically tailored men's corset, and that this would be considered women's clothes at all.

Like my brain understood it conceptually, but I'm like, no, this is a men's corset.

But the only context that some people have for a corset is that it's women's wear, it's women's fetish wear, it's women's vintage and extreme and whatever clothing, and I'm like, it's just a men's corset.

That my brain has been embedded in these bubbles for a lifetime, that even when I was born, as a child of two Army Intel folks, right, like two Army Intel officers, this was not, my reality has been so outside the norm that I try so hard to place myself and translate myself into a common language.

But I understand now in this last year, more than I have ever before, how much my existence has been outside the norm and how much I really need to work on my translation matrix.

That when I say, take a moment and look in your partner's eyes and breathe with them, that that is a profound act for many out there in the world.

And it's a big deal for me.

I feel a moment of deep connection and bonding and beauty.

But I've also been doing that since I was 14.

And I've been doing it with friends before that.

I have to remind myself.

I mean, I even catch myself there, right?

I have to remind myself that that's a profound act that has never been done before.

And that's not to say that those of you at home who are finding these things for the first time are in any way, shape or form wrong.

No, what I'm saying is that I have not been conscious of my own bubbles.

I have not been conscious of my own journey.

I have not been aware fully of these things that I had been doing.

I had not been aware that when I decided to live in Arizona as a hermit, that I would do a three-week tour going from bubble to bubble to bubble, having these crazy adventures, and then I would go home and I would hide, I was still going into a bubble.

That I spent very little time comparatively in Arizona.

I spent time going to little coffee shops and going to doctor's offices that I knew that had more of a liberal leaning.

That I wasn't fully conscious that I had developed bubbles.

That I was doing things that even when I went down to my taco place that I loved, America's Tacos, I love you, I really, really miss you, mmm, the tasty tacos.

Like I swear, there's a part of me that just wants to go back to Arizona, I mean, obviously to see, you know, very dear friends of mine, my best friend lives down there, but tacos, mmm, tacos.

But like, I haven't been fully conscious and I'm trying to now develop a consciousness.

And part of the consciousness I've been really working towards is the notion of experience as compared to age.

When I was in my mid-20s, mid-20s, early 20s, I think early 20s, yeah, early 20s, I got to get involved with the TNG movement.

This is back in 2002, 2001, somewhere in there, whenever TNG in New York was.

And it was really interesting to me that it was all of these people who were between the ages of 18 and 30, showing up to talk about the needs for that specific demographic with a few folks that were in their early 30s, to talk about the needs of that specific demographic.

Because as great as it is to learn from people in their 60s and 70s, it can be sometimes socially awkward for someone who is 18 to literally be learning from their parents.

Because we live in, the kink community nowadays has a lot of multi-generational families who don't interact with each other, but are all involved in alternative sexual practice in some way, shape or form.

So there was that, but also forming parties that we were drawn to.

And it was called TNG, the next generation, because Star Trek Next Generation was still a thing, right?

It was a cultural meme that we could all draw upon.

And the idea was also that newcomers could meet with newcomers and really understand each other.

And I was like, that's really cool.

But here I was in my early 20s and I'd already been around in the scene for, you know, publicly for, you know, six, seven, whatever years.

And I was like, that's really cool.

But I've already been doing this for a little while.

So when I went back to Portland and handed the ideas off to my friend Robin, I was just like, and now it's yours.

Because I don't really feel drawn towards this.

And I feel really excited about the fact that I'm 35 now, because even the groups that are stretching and saying, you know, 18 to 35, are in TNG or in some cases 18 to 40.

And because there are some of the founding members that don't want to leave, or because there's a reason for a resonance within those different age brackets in that community.

But it might be worthwhile for people who are 40 to consider how much they have socially in common with somebody who's 18.

Different people are different.

And as an 18 year old, I would say I was operating differently than some 25 year olds I know.

That's neither here nor there.

But it was really interesting who bonded with who.

And if you're in your 40s and you're bonding with somebody who's 18, you guys are a perfect fit.

Awesome.

Go for it.

But it's really exciting to me because I was being contacted even last year saying, you're a TNG presenter.

You should come and teach for a TNG group.

And I found myself baffled because I'm like, I've been in the scene for 15 years.

And do I have things to offer to these communities?

Absolutely.

Having danced to these dances, I feel like I have a different volume of material that I might be bringing to the show.

It's not to say somebody who's only been teaching for two years doesn't have something amazing to offer because they do.

And sometimes they have so, you know, such fresh voices that they don't know what they're supposed to be saying and therefore bring new material to the table.

That's why I love talking to four-year-olds sometimes because they say things and do things because they haven't been trained yet what not to say and do.

I love it.

Don't compare for you.

Anyway, the words stumble, we move forward.

And so it's really interesting to me and exciting that I'm no longer in that age bracket because I can move into this next chapter that I thought I've been in for the last ten years that I felt more resonant with for the last ten years.

And I really like looking back and being able to say, wow, I get to have my 20 year anniversary in the kink community in just a few years.

That's really cool.

I'm really excited.

I get to look forward to the next 35 years and say, what's going to happen next?

I look forward to being a crotchety old guy when I'm in my 90s, like this gentleman whose lap I sat on back in like 99, I think.

I was in London.

And I'm there in a latex dress.

I think it was, it wasn't club submission.

It was this place that you had to walk up to the second story.

There's one flat floor and it had a big dance floor.

And there's this guy.

And he was in his late 80s or early 90s.

He's sitting there wearing a pair of PBC pants and a shirt.

And all these girls are one at a time coming and sitting on his lap.

And there I am in my latex dress sitting on his lap.

And I said, what's your favorite thing about coming to parties like this?

And he said, if anybody had told me when I was 40 years old that I would be in my 90s getting more hot girls than I was then, I wouldn't believe it.

And that's the 90-year-old I want to be.

Not that I want to still be celebrating life and excited about life.

And our culture has such a cult of ageism, has such an obsession with being young and beautiful, with being, you know, two of my cousins are fashion models, and they're in their, I think they're 14 now, but they were modeling at the age of 12 in adult advertisement in kind of sexy outfits.

And I'm like, this is disturbing that we are setting our norms for what women are supposed to look like through dressing up 12 year olds in skimpy outfits and putting rouge on their faces.

That is disturbing to me.

We live in a culture that airbrushes away our laugh lines and our little crows feet.

I was watching The Voice last night.

Yes, don't judge me.

I was watching The Voice last night.

And I was delighted that in the makeup that was done last night, you could see a little bit of Gwen's crows feet.

And I was like, oh, thank you.

You are rocking up sexy and fantastic in all of your form.

And that somehow it's acceptable for men to rock up with their silver hair and all that stuff, but women, oh, why aren't you plucking those little strands?

Why aren't you dyeing them to look more like what you should be?

Silver is sexy.

Silver is incredibly sexy.

I am not saying that to fetishize silver hair, though at times I will admit that I do.

I am saying that because I believe we are each truly beautiful in our own ways, that we can cultivate our truth.

And if your truth is to dye your hair black because you enjoy having pitch black hair, go for it.

That's beautiful, too.

But I am delighted that my silver hairs are coming in on my sides and in my beard and down below as well.

I love it.

Because I still get carted.

And now, like, really?

Just because I'm a trans guy.

I swear trans men and people might have heard me say this joke before, but I am convinced that trans men, when we get our first testosterone shot, we are handed a painting and it ages a la Dorian Gray for us in a closet.

I'm gonna look like I'm 45 when I'm 60.

And that frustrates me a little bit, but, you know, it is what it is.

When I was, you know, 19 years old in a little slinky latex dress, I can't imagine myself now sitting here in a ganache hoodie with rockin a beard and my silver hair is comin in on my sides.

Or maybe I could.

I mean, there are parts of me when I was a teen, I thought about transition actively, like I was going to therapy.

But in my late teens and early 20s, I'd found out that I wasn't going to be able to be who I wanted to be with transition based on my therapist's take on it.

And so I chose to embrace my femininity and my womanhood, womanhood full force.

And I got brandings on both sides of my legs, both legs on the outside of each leg, one that was male and one that was female to empower myself.

I think I was 21 or 22 when I did that.

Oh no, I could probably go back and look at my blogs.

But that I had one done, they were both at Burning Man, and that one was done on the outside of the left leg at night, having fasted all day, wearing black leather and a long black leather loin cloth, along with 40 other people who were getting the same Burning Man brand done by Fakir Musafar and Cleo and their slave person.

I'm not sure entirely identity, actually.

They're Sam.

Having this brand done for me, and then the next day I feasted and had a brand that was, that one was Strike Branding and the other one was done with Cottery Branding, with Cleo doing the main strikes, and Fakir dressed as Kiki there, surrounded by only women holding my hand in a very private ritual in full daylight.

In the space in between, my former master had showed up and apologized for things that had gone horribly, horribly wrong during our breakup.

And I'd cried my eyes out, and I'd had this healing piece.

At that point, I had firmly acknowledged that I was in a genderqueer, bi-gendered, women-in-life, man-behind-closed-doors-sometimes person.

We can't always know how we're going to see reality ten years from now.

I am profoundly impressed by people who at the age of 12 say, I want to be a doctor.

And at 16 have all their scholarships lined up to get into undergrad and end up nailing into pre-med, into med, and getting the job of their dreams that they have been dreaming about since they were a teen.

I am envious because my years of journey do not show that.

My years of journey have me taken by spirit from place to place, succeeding oftentimes in the places that I landed.

But my degree is in arts administration and cultural studies.

I did my internship at the Victoria Albert Museum in the Royal Court Theatre.

That is not what I am doing.

I still love the arts, and on the side I am currently doing theatre reviews for the Anchorage Press.

Which is fun, though tricky when you live in a small town to not say things like, the actor forgot half of their lines at the beginning of Act 1.

That's awkward.

Okay, half was an overstatement.

He only forgot, I think, three lines, but it was in the opening show, and that's tough.

Opening segment.

But it is really interesting to me that I did all of this work, all of this hard, collegiate work, and nope, that's it.

That's all that came of it.

I came back to the United States, and I ended up going and getting a job through random happenstance as a database administrator for a Christian faith organization while shooting porn on the weekends.

My life story, when I tell it, if it had been in a fiction novel, I would think that it has jumped the shark.

I would absolutely think it had jumped the shark.

When I went down to the University of Sydney to interview about possibly going to school there for a sexology degree, when I sat down with the woman and told her just a tiny piece of my life story, she said, your dissertation should be on your life.

And this is from a woman who meant it very seriously.

This was the woman who ran the program saying this very seriously.

I used to joke that my biography should be shot by, should be done, like people would say, like, if somebody could be or play you in a biography, who would it be?

And my joke used to be Maggie and Jake Gyllenhaal.

Because in some ways it would have been true if we had stopped my documentary right about now.

But I'm not done.

I've got a lot of work to do.

I've had periods in my life where I didn't think I was going to be around to continue forward.

But what I had explained to me by the deity that I serve, because for those who do not know, I am very devout in my following of Mother Bear, who some might call a totem, but I see her as the goddess and experience her as the goddess that I cherish profoundly.

And I see divinity around the world.

I believe that there is an under currency of mother tongue, a degree of universalism, that everything is God.

And so therefore the idea of is this God or goddess or universal energy or whatever it might be, I believe them all to be true to some degree.

But simultaneously, I also experience various deities to be very separate from each other, various spirits to be very separate from each other and that they get across when you confuse them.

Aphrodite is not Venus, and she does not like being confused with Venus in most cases.

But it was interesting to me when I was having those moments of not being sure if I was going to be around, that the Mother Bear turned to me and she explained, I would say she said to me, but she doesn't use English.

But she explained to me that if I was dead, that would be fine.

But that my work wouldn't stop, that when I am dead, I simply won't get to have the pleasures that I do on this side of the veil, and that I will be doing my capital W work, my grand work, the things that I am on this plane for while on the other side.

And I went, oh, gotcha.

I personally would like to continue enjoying Dim Sum.

I would like to personally continue enjoying a nice set of wing tip shoes that I can feel wrapped around my feet.

I would personally like to continue feeling what certain sexual activities feel like upon my flesh.

It was a piece of the decision making process.

And it's hard sometimes because we're not supposed to talk about, in the world of kink, we're supposed to talk about safe, sane and consensual, right?

The things sane there in the center.

And as I mentioned in the interview with Wintersong a couple of episodes back, there are two new books that are out talking about neurological non-normativity and mental health adventures and submission and dominance because they're tricky concepts.

But it's something that has been part of my history and part of my journey.

And there, all of these pieces are all wrapped up in this thing called me.

That I am made of my stories and that you are made of your stories.

And yet I am more than my stories and you are more than your stories.

That one plus one does not necessarily equal two.

Sometimes one plus one equals 2.1.

Or three.

Or seven.

Or nine.

Or a million and a million and seven that continuously unfold in this blossoming being of self.

In this blossoming being of self.

This time of year, I sometimes have people ask me, what do you want for your birthday?

My general rule is no large statuary unless you ask me first.

Or ask my partner first.

But with all joking aside, gifts to Heifer International.

Feel free to buy a dozen chickens in my name and gift them to a family in Cambodia.

That's awesome.

If you're somebody who likes tangible things, I have an Amazon wish list.

And I actually have a patron of mine who for a long time was sending me a book a month.

And I feel really self-conscious about it sometimes because I haven't read about half of the ones that she had sent to me from my list.

But Great Answer pointed out in an interview I did for his podcast that one of the things that sex educators do and bloggers do is that we act as curators.

We act as curators of sexological knowledge.

That we can say, you know what, I spent 20 hours scouring the internet reading all of these essays and articles about sexuality, and here are the three that are actually good and that should be posted forward, and here are the four that we really need to argue against.

Let's rally ourselves and post about the fact that it's not good research.

Let's look at these different pieces and see why they need to be combated.

So she would send me a book a month, which I thought was incredibly sweet.

Birthdays are a curious thing for me because I don't always celebrate them.

And yet at the same time, I am grateful that I am still here.

I am blessed that I am still seen.

That I have friends who still believe in me.

That I have people who go, Oh, that thing you said, that's really cool.

And if you are not a spender and if you are not a whatever and you do still feel moved, because I am not asking for birthday presents, I just want having been alive to mean something bigger than having used up resources and adding to landfills.

That if you have one blog post of mine that you found meaningful or interesting, post it forward.

That if you went to one class of mine and you got one concept from it and you want to go write something yourself, and don't even mention me necessarily, just go and let the ideas pollinate.

Sit down with a friend and take a topic that I once brought up and turn it into something worthwhile over a cup of coffee.

Because then I feel like it will have been worthwhile somehow.

Because I think it is worthwhile.

For those who are interested with all of the different links I've mentioned and what not, please go over to the show notes and you'll see links to all of that information.

And if people have questions for my podcast, feel free to email me at Lee, L-E-E, at passionandsoul.com with the subject header Ask Lee.

And you could also go over to my website at passionandsoul.com, click on the podcast button and scroll down to get the information there.

iTunes listeners can reach me by typing in Lee Harrington into the search engine, or Passion And Soul, and scroll back through the archives.

If you found this useful or any of my other podcasts as a note, that counts too.

This has been the Passion And Soul Podcast, and until next time, stay cool, have fun, go dance another dance around the sun, be authentically you, and embrace your dreams.
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