I have been thinking about where I want this blog to go. But first, I’d like to talk about where it started.

Bloody Laughter didn’t start here. It started, in point of fact, with an open diary I had back with my first kinky boyfriend, where I wrote him love notes and jumped whenever I realized someone else was reading. That blog, before I deleted it, was called Your Sadism Is Showing. When I started dating Maymay I decided I needed somewhere to store ideas my family couldn’t read, and I started a LiveJournal, titled Sweet Steel. (It was that LiveJournal, incidentally, that eventually allowed my family member to connect this blog to me and subsequently confront me over my chosen topics.)

Just as I like to think that in his time with me May’s understanding and appreciation of art, literature and fashion have matured, I know that in my time with him my technical capabilities and opinions have matured. Hence, Livejournal moved to Blogger and eventually to my own site with WordPress, newly titled A Place To Draw Blood Laughing. I have in the past year hesitated over my choice of name, blunt and potentially disturbing as it is, but I kept it because I think it is poetic, and accurate.

At first blush, this was just a space I’d made where I could talk about how I have sex, and be sure (wrongfully sure, admittedly) that my nearest and dearest were not reading, or reading only with invitation and sympathy. It’s a theme here that I over analyze, that I am extremely body-conscious, that I am sensually driven and sex-positive and in some ways deeply strange. So it made sense to write about my strangeness, and to make a place for the dark parts of me to breathe.

And then there was a merry rush in the form of a golden summer of kink, of working on Floating World and digging out my strong opinions in words for the first time. Then there was the death-defying tailspin of being attacked over what I’ve said in this space, and my somewhat pathetic attempts to crawl my way out of the wreckage.

I limped along, for a while. I moved to Australia. I widened my scope.

I said when I started this blog that I would never apologize to myself if I didn’t want to update it. That was my little way of being clever, keeping myself free of the thing. In the end, though, that’s a stupid plan for a blog. Blogs should update. It is unfair of me to not update and still call this thing a blog, and want to make it thrive.

Maybe you have seen where this is going. Maybe you knew months ago, as I knew. As I’ve said before, I make decisions quickly and then come around to them slowly. The truth is I knew in the middle of last year that I would lay this blog to rest.

This is the end. A Place To Draw Blood Laughing is now closed.

I’ll give you two of my reasons. The first is creative.

At the height of this blog I was writing two posts a day and chronicling my sex life with lust and eager glee. I was also not writing anything but blog posts. My stories stagnated, my fiction trailed off and was eventually nothing. It seems I do not have the focus and energy to write here and also maintain my other creative pursuits.

As I’ve mentioned, I’m writing a manuscript, a long and meaty thing. In doing so, I have become jealous of my own words. I don’t want them here. I want them there, in the pages that are growing.

I pour letters out in the shape of sex, of Maymay’s hips and the wispy curls on his soft neck, of hot mornings alone in my bed with my hand between my thighs, of a blond Australian man who moves my hand to his throat when he comes and smiles in his own aftermath.

I pour them out and want to keep them for the book, this thing I’m trying to write that keeps growing into my creative spaces when I’ve looked the other way, so all of my drawings turn up pornography and all on my blog posts are sucked clean-dry.

The reality is I can’t figure out how to write about sex and blog about sex at the same time. I want to write this book more than I want to blog my current adventures; I want it to be finished so badly, the thought makes my chest ache.

The second reason I’m ending my time here is because I’d like to learn to speak for myself, openly, with my real name and my real voice.

I wrote once:

I honestly believe that being able to write what I want about my life and my sexuality is more important to me than the possibility that I may never teach children. I may never become powerful within a large company. I will definitely never run for public office…

A part of it is the belief, the naive, wide-eyed, furious, childish insistence that my life is my own, my body is my own, and I should always be able to speak my mind.

I can only be hurt by the words I write if those words represent a secret that is for some reason damaging. In many ways, being out protects me. Being unashamed, vocal and revealing can only limit the weapons available against me.

I have become increasingly skeptical of anonymity, or pseudo-anonymity, in my case. I’m certainly not saying we all need step from the shadows and reveal ourselves. I think our identities within our community are always our own, to do with as we like. But for me, keeping up the anonymous show seems increasingly pointless.

Most of the reasons I had to keep this journal separated from my real name vanished the day I sat down with my family member over Thanksgiving weekend and found my life suddenly ripped in tiny shreds. I clung stubbornly to the other reasons for a little while; the future jobs, the rest of the family, the possible consequences, the blinding, sneaky fear.

I find it very unfortunate and a little shameful that I feel the want to censor myself more fully now than I did when this blog began. Perhaps you could say that I’ve learned, or grown. You could say I’ve become more frightened, which is also true.

But in a wider sense, the real take-away is that my goals have changed. I am not content to speak from a pseudonym any longer. I have, in fact, soured radically upon the concept of not claiming my own ideas. But I recognize that speaking from my real name and voice will require a different perspective, and will have a different audience.

I’m sick of being afraid. I don’t want it any more. When it comes to emotional turmoil, I only really know how to bury things or confront them head on. I’m not sure which I’m doing right now.

The reality is that this is not an anonymous blog. Anyone with half a brain can find out who I am from here; Twitter was the last step that fell in place and clinched it. Any pretense we all may have made to my anonymity has been out of mutual respect and politeness. The sex community builds itself upon these fragile understandings, thin as sugar sticks. You support me, I support you. You trust me. I trust you.

I am out, but not unified. I’ve decided I’d like to feel unified, for once. I’d like to have a space on the web that can contain all of myself. Right now I have two sites and neither of them do what I what them to do. Both are limited, this site by its very narrow scope and my professional & personal site by its attempt to be clean. I would like a site that can be a little naughty, be professional, host my writing and my job hunt alongside my queer politics and community work. I don’t work well when I’m not fully integrated.

I’ve decided that I’d like to speak as myself, and that I can no longer accept the fragile, imagined protection of using other names and putting on a great pretending show. I am not a conjurer in that way. I am forthright, and know no other way to be.

My name is Sara.

I’d like to thank you for reading me as Eileen these past two years. I don’t mind if you keep calling me that; I answer to it now anyway.

I’ve found amazing support, dear friends and ever-expanding opportunities through this blog and the queer and kink scenes. I’m not leaving. I’m going to stay open, stay active, and keep writing. I’m going to make new spaces, run new events, spread new ideas. Perhaps I will return in a few years to this same ground, swept clean.

For those of you interested in the nitty gritty: the archives will remain active. I will continue to accept and respond to password requests. I may try to find a mental space that allows me to open those posts again; I’m not sure yet. The site may be slightly rearranged, but the content will not change dramatically, or be erased. The BloodyLaughter Twitter account will be suspended, as I’ve switched to SaraEileen.

In the meantime, you are invited to visit my personal site, where in the tradition of most blogs I am writing my way through being young, confused, and complicated. SaraEileen.com is a somewhat different website; it connects to my resume. It has my real name. It is not just about this part of my life, but also about writing, job-hunting, creativity and business. It will be a different blog, and I will not be offended if it doesn’t strike your fancy. Of course, I would love to see you there. As I said, I trust you.

It seems silly to just say thank you, but I will anyway.

Thank you for helping me take the big issues seriously and the little ones lightly.

Thank you for keeping me truthful, growing and proud in return for my words and affection.

It’s been raucous and wild. These things will continue. I’ll be seeing you, good people. I’m always around.

With love,
Sara

One of the things I keep noticing is that people light up when they grok the Kink For All/Bar Camp/unconference concept. It’s like something very remote and intangible has suddenly taken a dramatic leap closer in their minds. I loved explaining it tonight to our new friends, over mango daquiris. And I loved, in particular, how my friend immediately jumped from the event concept to the potential to create and share lasting information. “That’s so cool,” she said excitedly, “Will you tape it? Will you keep that information around for people who can’t attend?” And we laughed, and kept on talking. I wished she could be there when it happens.

I am excited for March already, and for bringing the concept to San Francisco if someone doesn’t beat us to it. It seems almost silly, this mix of activism and organisation and drive, but I like inhabiting it. I like feeling as though we all might do something that makes the world shift, just a little bit. Because how amazing is that? The thought that together, we can shift the world.

But when it arrived, all shrouded in bubble wrap and cardboard, I laughed aloud. I had failed to realize the essential flaw in this sexy plan: the thing is fucking huge. It is the size of my forearm; I feel vaguely as though it could be used to skewer a donkey.

Needless to say, at this point in time I have no intention of having sex with it.

So it’s sitting on our dresser now, alongside its case, my library books, and glasses cleaner. Every once and a while I pick it up and wave it at my boy. I’d attach it to the strap-on harness, but we don’t have a ring big enough to hold the monster.

Eventually I’ll find a place for it, somewhere in our teak box between the nylon and the hemp. The box is overflowing these days, as the weapons and gear of our sexuality gather to us.

I like that we still work without the toys, that we are still kinky naked, with nothing but our hands and mouths and tongues. Last night I wrapped my arm around May’s shoulders and held his wrists in my hand. With my other hand I cupped his cock, and stroked the tip of my thumb up and down the length of him over and over, until he had tears in his eyes and he whimpered like an angry child. He still had his t-shirt on, a soft cotton thing that smells like Old Spice. When I stopped he was angry, although I saw him try to hide it. His frustration was very sharp, and he thrashed on the bed and whined.

I rested a little while, while he struggled and pouted at me, his hands writhing inside mine. I closed my eyes and drifted toward the very edge of sleep. But I could feel the scene still in the air, like ending a concerto on an open tone.

“I like you like this, when you feel owned,” I said to him. I like him when every breath on his skin thrills him. I kissed his ear, his neck, pulled down his collar and licked his collarbone, pulled up his shirt and dragged my teeth against the barbell through his nipple. I kissed down his stomach and when I put my lips to the head of his cock he shrieked, almost sobbed into the pillow.

When he came, arching his ribs so that he stood off the bed like a bridge of flesh through the air, he shot so far he hit his own neck and shoulder, white streaks all over the thin cotton. And as he came I couldn’t help but think of water guns.

“Ah ga buh,” he said, when he could say things again.

“I’m sorry, what was that?” I smiled.

“Buz ugu ma.” He slurred the sounds, closed his eyes, long fingers sprawled across his sticky belly.

“I think I have broken you. Have you forgotten how to speak?”

He nodded. We giggled a little, and when I pushed him off the bed to shower he walked in zigzags, holding one hand to the wall to keep himself upright, all fluid, heavy limbs.

I have still not seen him play Johnny in The Wild One, but I don’t need to see the post-production photos to know I had a crush on a rebel.

I had a lot of trouble when I was a teenager trying to figure out what kind of man I wanted. Remember that this is pre-queer, pre-kink awareness, that I was still just a weird kid with weird friends and weird thoughts. And I loved Brando then. But now I wonder if I didn’t want to fuck him, so much as I wanted to be him. I watched Guys and Dolls again a few days ago and realized that he’s the only character I relate to. He’s also the only character with true agency and sexual power in the film, swinging as it does in its candy-colored 1940s New York. Go figure.

This crush was a strange one, because while I liked the man, and I liked the idea of the rebel, I didn’t see a space for me in his counterparts, in Stella or Sarah with their nice neat clothes. So I sort of gave up on him, and on the idea of falling for a rebel.

The undertone we can pick up in retrospect, of course, was that Brando’s image, and therefore my image of a rebel was a dominant man. I hadn’t learned yet how to sort the strength it takes to embrace countercultures from the overtly sexual nature of said strength. So I turned away from rebel crushes, though I do still have a soft spot in my heart for Brando.

I moved on to white knights.

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Predictably, my best friend is male. He is, in fact, the epitome of male. He is a heavyweight rower, hopefully (I still cross my fingers) Olympic-bound, and a sculptor. We came through our college art program together. He is my adopted family, my refuge. Stitch is my haven. He is also vanilla, monogamous, and Christian.

Stitch has deep-set eyes with smears of midnight blue slung around them in half-moons. He has thick black brows, thick black hair, a thick, rich voice. I am not a small woman, but his hands can span my waist and the breadth of his shoulders doubles my own. One of the first nights I met him we sat in big brown leather chairs by an open window, somewhere I forget, and he read me the Song of Solomon from his battered bible.

He occupies a strangely shaped place in my heart, not so much other-manly as other-worldly. He’s the man I would have wanted if I had grown up my own sexual complement. I was in love with him, for a laughable gap of months, the way sometimes little girls are in love with rock stars. That totally impossible, sexually incompatible, logically incomprehensible kind of way.

This story is the beginning of that laughable gap.

Eight-thirty on a Thursday night in spring four years and seven months ago, Stitch called me. I was sitting at my crappy desk trying to thread seed beads. The light was weak, I hadn’t bought new bulbs for the lamp, and my eyes hurt. I was short when I picked up the phone, a bit of a snap in my speech.

Stitch’s voice is a rumble over wires. “Hey, I mean, hi, am I interrupting?”

“Yes,” I answered. “You suck, and I hate you.”

He made an ‘Mmmmhm’ noise, the half laugh of someone who knows me too well. “Do you want to come to the studio with me? I have a thing to finish for tomorrow.”

“I don’t really have any studio work to do right now.” I knocked a few seed beads off the desk. “But no, I’ll come. I want to get out.”

“You don’t have to come.”

“I know.”

The sculpture studio of our art department was eleven blocks uptown, one of those flung-off outlier old buildings skirting the edges of where I don’t walk at night. I met the boy on the sidewalk of 117th, stuck my tongue out at him, and buried my head under his chin as he wrapped me up for a moment and blocked out the light of the street.

Stitch wore a mechanics suit in dirty blue, a one piece canvas sheath with a zipper up the front, and a black beater underneath. It was open past his navel, letting in the warm night, and the shape of his shoulders showed through. The bitter smell of his sweat filled the creases of the canvas.

“I didn’t mean to drag you out,” he said.

I thought of the seed beads rolling over my floor. “No worries, lil bro.”

“You really don’t have to come if you don’t want to.” He sounded genuinely worried, and his brown eyes had gone liquid and wary.

“I’m here already!” I cried. “I’ve come, I’m breathing deep and half asleep, I’ve come for fucks sake – Will you calm down?”

His eyes went from wary to warm. “That was brilliant. Did you think of that yourself?” He was smiling at me indulgently.

“Sometimes I am funny, you know.” I glared at him sideways. He smirked again. “Jackass,” I snarled, but it was too late; I was laughing.

Stitch was in the middle of a metals class that semester. The metal studio is on the top floor of the building, and has two steel tables and a double barn door in the corner that opens onto the roof. The roof was his favorite place to test theories; Stitch had a penchant for setting his sculptures on fire.

He gathered tools and scraps and three sheets of steel together while I puttered about in the corners of the room, knocking my sketchbook against things. Working studios are a fabulous place to putter; half-finished pieces abandoned by freshman were tucked in corners, bins of bits of sawed-off copper rods and shiny stacks of solder neatly lined up on wooden benches. The room was empty but for us. I swung myself up onto one of the tables, tucked my legs under me and watched him move, a pencil in my hand quickly forgotten.

There is something undeniably butch about men welding or soldering steel. Welding is a focused stream of slow, strong motion; the torch can give the illusion of kicking back, making the hand shake and causing bubbles in the metal. Get too wrapped up in the danger of the tool, the heat and shivery noise of burning gas, and nothing comes out right. Smooth lines come with control. I thought of holding a knife to someone’s cheek, of sliding needles into skin with a smile, the same kind of casual confidence.

Stitch had pushed a helmet with a face guard over his head, zipped his coverall up to the neck, and was working with his back to me, shielding the torch flame from view. He had two of his flat steel sheets pressed together in a right angle. A pretty welt of metal grew along the seam.

I detailed the edges of his clothing with my eyes, the brace of his feet pressed against the concrete, the impossibly broad shoulders, the impossibly thick arms. Stitch has never had an ass worth noticing, but the blend of his spine into his thighs, lean with crew muscles, is undeniably eye catching.

I caught myself undressing him, sketching in the flanks and shadows.

Stitch seems easy to mentally undress. Sometimes when we would go into the city on Saturday romps I would see women (and men) doing it, their eyes calculating, his clothes vanishing one by one in puffs of fantasy smoke.

But then, I had seen him stripped before that night in the studio, come back from late nights at the gym in sweaty spandex, peeling back the cling of the soaked fabric. I knew the color of his skin (faded tan, olive undertones), the pockmarks in his back, the lines of his hips. The web of personal history laid over the fantasy frame.

Stitch has a body of secrets. Scars, dips, invisible fingerprints. Tight bulges where he’s strained muscles most of us never use.

This night in the studio was the first time I wanted to know his secrets. Wholly, utterly. Biblically.

The entire room was humming, through the muscles of his legs to the floor and up the legs of the table I was sitting on, buzzing delicately on those sensitive lines of skin where my labia meet my thighs. His sculpture was growing, slowly.

I could see it happening, how the wires of artistic tension and sexual tension were crossing in my mind. You’re being dumb, my logical brain thought quietly. He’s your best friend, he has a girlfriend, and you don’t actually want to fuck him on a welding table. My body begged to differ, the steel under me turning warm. The seam of denim pressed to my crotch was damp.

This is how I am with art and artists. I get strung out in the tight-wire of craft and form. I chronically sensualize process and creation, when we exist in a bubble of time shaped by the things we make with our hands, and pressed together by the understanding of how the things are made.

Eventually he turned the torch off, stepped away, undid his coverall and let it fall to his waist. He tied it off in a narrow band. His smell hit me as I crept up on him: boy, Old Spice, bitterness, steel, sweat, skin.

“Oh, fuck me,” he said quietly.

“What?” I jumped a little.

He turned, gave me a wry look and a sigh. “I fucked up. See? There.” He pointed.

“Oh.”

“What did you think I said?”

“I don’t know. Nothing.”

He wiped a dirty forearm over his brow. “Let’s go home,” he said. “Come on, I’ll buy you a donut for coming out here with me for no reason.”

It was just you being horny, and the metal, I thought as I watched him walk home ahead of me, his long familiar stride. You’ll get over it. A soothing lie.

It took me a year to get over him.

It seems to me that a group of powerless people people cannot expect to have their rights defended solely from outside sources. Unfortunately, Superman does not fly around the globe defending sexual freedom, although I have to say I’d love to see it if he did.

It seems to me that power comes when people listen.

Why do people listen?

Seriously. Think about that. Who do you listen to? Why do you listen to them? I don’t mean to use the word to imply just hearing another person’s words and then responding, using them as a springboard for your own thoughts. I mean the people you take the time to understand when they present a viewpoint that is not your own.

Who do I listen to? I listen to people I respect. Why do I listen to them? Because they’ve proven to me in the past that they deserve my respect.

Logical problem. Redefine the question: why do I start listening?

I start listening to people I find interesting, or who I see as potentially having characteristics I value. I like people who are articulate, smart, excited. Funny. Wise. I like people who talk about things I care about. Everybody’s got a different list of reasons they might start listening.

It seems to me that commonly (not always, but commonly) I listen to people who are similar to me. It seems to me that most of us do this.

So if I, for example, wanted to say something to people who are incredibly unlike me, how would I get them to start listening?

Why else do I start listening? Well, I start listening to people who already hold some kind of power. Academics come to mind. It seems to me that this is common practice as well. We give more power to the powerful.

Beauty is a kind of power; more attention is paid to beautiful people. Money is a kind of power; more attention is paid to the rich. Mainstream education is a kind of power; more attention is paid to the educated.

Yes, of course it sucks. In fact, that right there might be most of the reason our world is fucked over. A self-perpetuating cycle of power based on class, wherein class is defined by values that we do not agree with.

Eileen, what the hell are you talking about?

You know what sparked this weirdly rambling thought process? Susan Wright, media spokesperson for sexual rights, wore a suit jacket to Floating World, a situation potentially involving the press. That’s it. That’s all it was.

I wrote that I like blogging because it partially protects me from agism. I wrote that I like wearing business clothes because I get better service in stores. What this boils down to is that I like being able to control my appearance because it allows me to affect my own power. I have this one particular way to expand and contract my cultural footprint, the space I take up, the influence I have on others.

(That’s right, sorry. This post is going to end up being about fashion.)

At the beginning of Pirates of Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs is trying to get a bank loan. He goes to a bunch of different banks in grubby clothes and long hair, repeatedly failing to get his loan until the day he gets a haircut and wears a suit. Banks don’t like long hair.

As much as it sucks to say it, if I dyed my hair bright blue and started wearing my leather jacket everywhere I went, my mainstream cultural footprint would shrink. This gets handled differently by different people; most members of outlaw cultures choose to say, “Fuck it, lookism is bullshit and I have a right to wear what I want and be respected.” Which is true. Which is why sometimes I do wear my leather jacket, and maybe I will dye my hair blue.

In theory I should have just as much power no matter how I look, because in theory emphatic gestures sweeping aside stupid opinions work perfectly. But practically applied, emphatic gestures just keep failing me.

What I look like says something about me. Maybe it shouldn’t, but it does. “Don’t judge a book by its cover” is still a proverb because people are still doing it.

If I know I get more respect in a suit jacket, even if I think the reasons behind why the respect is being accorded are false and damaging to my community, do I wear the jacket?

Do I reject culture or subvert culture?