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 our recent challenges has been working from home together. The biggest hurdle at the moment is that our sleep schedules are absolutely fucked. It has been rare for me in the past few weeks to hit my pillow before 4am. Maymay does the same. That means we miss a lot of mornings. 

I sleep less than he does. And I wake up more quickly. Truth be told, had my lifestyle not unfolded in such a way that being a night owl is intrinsic to my interests and company, I would be a morning person. I like mornings. I wake up quickly. I write better in the morning. (But I write sexier in the night. Go figure.)

It’s hard for me to work and spend the day with May at the same time. And I have been feeling on the antsy side. There are many reasons we might spend time together or apart. But with living together, working together, being attached to each other, it gets a little much. 

We have been scheduling time apart from one another our entire relationship. That that works well. It means that we’re assured of our own spaces. We have been doing that, of late. It works well. It keeps me balanced. It makes me hungry for him when I come back home.

He is still asleep as I write this. I am going to the beach today. (Even though it looks like it might rain.) I am tempted not to wake him up before I go; he looks so lovely in his sleep. The thing is, it’s good to go my own way for a while. But in truth, I miss him. I miss him even when he’s right next to me. I miss his skin on mine.

Tonight I saw an incredibly weird play about the first feminist queen of Lapland. When I came home, I closed my CollarMe account. Strangely, these things do have something to do with one another. In the play, the queen is called “swashbuckling”. I had forgotten how much I love that word, swashbuckling. I realized there was a part of me that used to ache to inhabit such a word, and that the ache is still there.

And when I came home and signed online, looking at the messages in my inbox and the words coming up on the screen, I also realized that there is no place for swashbuckling women on CollarMe. There is some potential there, but most of it is buried and I don’t care enough to go digging. There is too much shit in the way.

When I clicked the button to close my account, this is the message that appeared, letter for letter:

http://collarme.com
Perminantly close your account?

Really, that about sums it up. And I would laugh, if it wasn’t just so fucking pathetic.

For one thing, I have not yet sorted what I want to be from what I want to have. Everything is all mixed up, and in the meantime I look in the mirror and feel as though my skin is quicksilver and my eyes are changing color.

I’ve been trying to write it down, but I can’t remember how the words should go.

The Boston Boy is short, not small. Thick in his legs, round like apples and then broad like bodies of water. He has dark curling hair that twists into his ears and twines around my fingers.

Where was Maymay, the night of that party? I can’t place him in my mind, which makes me think he was at home. This piece will explain why I will never write a non-fiction memoir; I fill the gaps of my life in with fictions I create from the vapor of nothing, because the gaps themselves are huge and dark and frustrating. Last weekend I walked down the street with Maymay and said that I felt sad, and tried to explain my reasons. He turned to me and said gently, “That’s the same reason you were sad before we moved, six months ago. Don’t you remember us talking about it?” And I had to say no: I remember sitting, I remember words in my mouth, but I don’t remember why I was sad back then, in that anonymous time six months ago. I barely know why I’m sad now.

I remember the Boston Boy closed his eyes tight, and closed his face up as well. When he was finally against the wall of Rob’s little bedroom with his shirt on the floor at his feet, he stood perfectly still. I remember I ran my hands over his body.

“I’m sorry I’m so quiet,” he said, and his words came out odd in my ears. “I know you like it when there’re noises.” I think that I told him it was all right.

And then there is a gap. Trying to fill it with fiction makes me lonely, so I’m going to leave it unfilled.

Later, I grabbed the meat of his shoulder and wrestled him down onto the floor. He went down easy, and when I sat on top of his chest and pinned his elbows to his sides I could feel the muscles of his arms flexing and relaxing as he grabbed at the waistband of his shorts.

“What are you doing?” I leaned over him softly.

“Just trying not to fight back,” he said.

And I remember I asked him what he meant, and then I said, “Let’s try that, then,” and I kept hitting him.

I hit him until he wrenched his arms from under my body, flipped me easily and pinned me to the floor. I struggled a little, then looked him in the eyes. “All right,” I said then, “that’s enough.”

And I remember he threw himself backward, put his back to the corner and curled in a ball with his hands over his head. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” He cried it in something that sounded like fear. I almost melted away.

And then, another gap. Writing like this makes me frustrated, makes me miss the golden sheen of the bubble I’ve capped over my time in New York. I don’t know if capping it makes things better or worse. A few days ago Maymay and I sat in a cafe, and I said maybe I want to move back to the States. No more guesswork, no more tentative movements or subtle disconnections. My life feels faded, fragile, incomplete.

“Let’s go to San Francisco,” I said.

I remember toward the end of the scene with the Boston Boy I pressed the pointed tip of a knife between his eyebrows, and he sank against the wall and made one low noise, without opening his lips at all. I remember deciding that noise was enough, and I remember it so clearly because I keep it wrapped in my head in a bit of tissue paper, that one beautiful noise.

I’m trying to write it down now, how the scene ended. Did we sit on the floor? I think we did. Did I put my arms around him? I hope I did. Some of this piece was fictional, but my hope in that hypothetical moment is real.

Sinclair wrote a great post about butch body hair that has sparked off some really interesting comparative experiences. I hung around in her comment box chattering away until I realized I’d written an entire blog post of my own, and yanked it back over here.

So. Hair. Prepare for some personal information dumping.

I’m trying to figure out where I fit in the gender galaxy. I’m content to make this a slow, meandering process; I feel no burning need, at this very instant, to figure out exactly what I am and how I fit into the boxes. At the moment, if anyone asks I’ll say I’m standing at the intersections of queer and butch and dom and quirky, staring at the street signs quizzically and wondering how to get to the nearest deli.

But I have recently changed my attitude to my body hair, and the change is, in that peculiar meandering way, somehow connected to my gender identity.

My body hair is naturally light. I don’t grow hair on my face except my thin, arched eybrows, and my arms are barely covered in tiny glinting blonde strands.

I shave my legs. I barely have to, as the hair only really grows from mid-calf downward. But I do. For three reasons: the ritual, the texture and the look. I love folding leg shaving in with a good long bath and some relaxation. And I am obsessed with texture; when my legs are smooth and moisturized they feel amazing. I like how having shaved legs makes my sheets feel slippery. Sort of hard to explain, that.

But it is also because I still connect the look of shaved legs with the cultural images of grace and femininity. I wonder sometimes if I still shave my legs because the wealth of my body hair is still something intimately private to me. Or if I’m just not brave enough to display myself grown out. Or if I’ve still got a little femme in me. I probably do, and I think I like her there.

I pluck the stray hairs that grow on my nipples. (And yes, if you didn’t know, women do grow pubic hair on their nipples.) I don’t really care about having hairy nipples, but I like plucking them in the same way I like picking at scabs and cutting my toenails. These are the weird little body quirks that interest me.

I wrote ages and ages ago that I was growing my pubic hair out. That lasted for a while. Then I trimmed it, then I shaved it. Then I grew it out and trimmed it again. Then I had some ill-fated adventures into complicated landscaping. Now I’m growing it out again. It’s longer that the hair on my head. I like it. I also found a company that sells pubic hair dye, and am flirting with the thought of turning it blue. Because hey, why not?

The major result of my change in attitude is that I’ve grown out my underarms. I’ve never done this before. My underarms have been shaved smooth since they first started sprouting fifteen years ago. But again I thought, what the hell, why not?

The first thing I noticed of these budding new hairs is that they’re very different in texture that I expected. I had thought my underarms would sport the same wiry, rich brown hairs as my vagina. But no. They’re thin and soft and silky. They feel a bit like having a tiny, expensive fur muff wedged under each arm.

The second thing I noticed is that my smell has changed. I bear odd resemblances to the people whose smells fascinate me: Maymay, Stitch, Bear. In short, I smell like a boy. It was a disconcerting experience at the time. Standing in our kitchen I’d turn my head expecting Maymay to be standing next to me, and find no one. The scent of skin and powder has vanished, replaced by sweat and light musk.

I loved how boys dressed, and then realized I could dress the same way. I loved how boys sat in chairs like little sprawling kings, and then began to sprawl myself. I loved how boys smelled, but I always thought that particular smell was something that didn’t make it into my portion of the biological soup.

I was wrong.

Let me break one factor of this change down. Hopefully with some delicacy. I want to talk about money.

Even though I should know it by now, it consistently shocks me how expensive it is to be kinky. Money is one way in which much of the public scene is privileged; there is literally a bar to entry open to a selected few. (Not to mention all the other ways in which much of the scene caters to a particular privilege: age, time, location, race, gender, orientation, able-bodied, to name a few. With a nexus of overlying, unspoken requirements, it’s no wonder the public scene is comparatively tiny.)

Now, I’ve come to realize that the Australian relationship with money as I currently see it is a little different than I’m used to. Namely, they spend more on their pleasures. It’s not just that Sydney is an expensive city, especially with food prices skyrocketed. NYC is also an expensive city; I’m used to this.

Rather, it seems a regular occurrence for the people I hang out with to drop $100 on alcohol in a single night. A weeknight. On a weekend? An American girl I met the other day told me, in hushed tones, that an Australian guy she knows spent $600 last Saturday, between clubs, cabs, and drinks. We stared at each other with our mouths open. $600 is my rent for a month.

So it doesn’t seem like a good enough reason, in this culture, for me to say that something is simply too expensive.

I have spent a lot of money on the weapons and gear of my sexuality of choice. I have spent a lot of money on events like Floating World and Black Rose. Thousands of dollars. Thousands of dollars that I, and others in my economic situation, cannot technically count as disposable income. And as half of a couple who travel together and split our expenses, for every dollar I spend, Maymay spends one too.

If we shall speak very technically, it is not too expensive for me to spend $40 to go to a play party. I do have $40 in my bank account, and it could potentially go toward such a thing. So let me be a little more honest.

Unfortunately for the good people I’ve met here in the scene, some of whom host simply gorgeous parties, I have a hard time getting myself out and putting down cash at the door. This, I should clarify, is not through the fault of their parties. This is because, as I mentioned, the things I want from the scene have changed:

Where I used to consider the possibility of pick-up play, I now play only with established partners and long-term friends.

Where I used to feed from the energy in kinky spaces, I now feel awkward and exposed.

Where I used to be willing to manage the social minefield of not knowing anyone on the room, I now feel more comfortable around at least a few people I’m close to.

And where I used to be able to make friends with people solely upon the common ground of shared sexualities, I now find myself unable to do so. This has unfortunately knocked munches off my list, as well as parties.

So the events are not at fault. But the events are no longer right for me. And the Sydney scene appears to be structured in such a way that these kinds of events are the first point of entry.

So when I say that something is too expensive, I am being a little unfair. What I should say is that I’m not, at this point in my life, willing to pay an entry fee in order to be exposed to a number of kinky people with whom I have a slight chance of becoming friends. Because that’s what these parties have become for me; the vapor of a possibility that one of the other attendees might be someone I want to make friends with.

In the end, having complementary sexualities has almost no value for me in forging new friendships. It comes below a laundry list of other factors that must first align: our humor, our interests, our intellectual inquiries, our attitudes toward society and life and ourselves.

Complementary sexualities become a real factor in maintaining a relationship once sex itself becomes a factor of that relationship. To say that I am more likely to find friends among the kinky is similar to saying that if I were hetero, I would be more likely to find friends among men. Largely illogical, consistently untrue.

I have been reassessing the return on my investments, so to speak. Unfortunately, if I go to a play party that does not yield me any kind of good feeling, friendship, or conversation, I don’t just shrug it off. I get upset at myself, a little depressed. And where I get a little upset, Maymay becomes angrily vicious and bitter. It is not uncommon for us to leave play parties that are unsuccessful (by our standards), go home, fight, and end up miserable and crying. So in many ways, an entry fee is not just an entry fee; it’s a gamble.

And as what I’m looking for diverges further and further from what play parties are designed to deliver, the gamble becomes increasingly bad.

Here’s the situation. Maymay and I make a kinky friend or two. Perhaps we’ve chatted at a party. Maybe we meet someone new online, or we find ourselves in touch through an event or meeting. In any case, the lines of communication are open. All parties have access to all relevant email addresses, et cetera.

And then, a day or two later, I will get a sweet, polite email in my inbox. It will usually express how great it was to meet the two of us, and sometimes propose a date for coffee or extend an invitation. All seems well, yes?

Except I’ll go ask Maymay if he’d like to take that date, or act on the invitation we’ve been given, and I’ll be greeted with a blank stare. “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he’ll say. “I didn’t get that email.”

What has happened? Does the Cc box not work for kinky people? Is Reply All on the fritz?

This has never, ever happened with correspondence to us in a vanilla context. It has happened several times with correspondence in a kinky context. And it is weird, annoying, and occasionally downright inappropriate.

Yes, it’s true that we live together, and we see each other’s emails. It’s true that we read each other’s blog comments and Twitter feeds. It’s true that messages for him will still find their source through me. But I find the method rather nonsensical, especially regarding events and invitations. If you have something to say to Maymay, say it to him. His contact info is so easy to find, you can trip over it.

Why does this happen? Sometimes, I suspect laziness. But frankly, how hard is it to type another email address?

Other times I suspect that although I’m the dominant one, Maymay is the more intimidating. I advise all parties concerned to get over this. He is intimidating, and abrasive. He’s also worth knowing.

And occasionally I do think this is a technical goof. Not everyone is email savvy: forgiven. Once. Email is not like the telephone. Believe it or not, more than two people can participate in an email conversation.

Most commonly, I fear, correspondance that should go to both of us ends up sitting in solitary in my mailbox because kinky people have this persistent, annoying tendancy to assume that because I am dominant, I am also the main point of contact in our relationship’s public face. (And yes, our relationship does have a public face.) This trickles down into all kinds of dangerous assumptions, not the least of which are:

That we’re in a 24/7 D/s dynamic. (Technically I’d argue we are, but we don’t advertise that fact, and we don’t suspend collaborative decision making.)

Or, that dominants make decisions, and submissives take orders. In social contexts, in scene contexts. What’s next? Shall I start ringing my boy at lunch to tell him how much sugar to stir into his coffee? Destroy this terrible, awful assumption before we all make ourselves out as assholes. I’m not our manager.

Or, that I speak for Maymay. Frankly, no. Just no. And I think that when meeting the two of us this should be obvious. But apparently it isn’t.

New acquaintances have no idea what roles Maymay and I play in our relationship even if they do know our dynamic. And really, it should be fairly easy to see that addressing mutually applicable emails only to me implies that you consider Maymay to be an unequal partner in our relationship.

Point the first: Maymay might be an unequal partner in some parts of our private relationship, but he is most definitely my equal counterpart as far as our public face is concerned.

And point the second: Unless we tell you otherwise, to treat the two of us as unequal partners of our own relationship disrespects us. Both of us.

Newsflash: non-consensually disrespecting submissives is still a shitty thing to do.

This behavior is a precise, miniaturized version of attempting to negotiate scenes with Maymay through me. I have said before, and I will say many, many times again: he does his own negotiation. Take it up with him.

Let’s dispense with the assumptions, and bring back the Cc box. I’m sick of playing messenger.

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