Introduction to a Festschrift
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"Politically correct sexuality is a paradoxical concept."
Joan Salon, "The Femme Question"
[in The Persistent Desire, edited by Joan Nestle]
[From 1991 - 2000 I wrote a monthly column advice column called "Ask the Therapist" for Growing Pains (GP), the house organ of The Society of Janus. Late in 1996 the editor asked if I would like to occupy an entire issue of the magazine with my own writing - a prospect he offered to at least one other writer as well. I accepted his invitation, and while I will not include the entire contents of that issue here, I do include a modestly edited and updated version of my Introduction and Afterword. The special issue devoted to my work, which appeared in January, 1997, was called "Am I A Sexual Minority?"]
When V invited me to edit my own little festschrift for GP my first response was, "What an honor; what an opportunity!" My second was, "What an obligation!" After all, it takes time to string a few thousand words together even if they don't make sense, and with a compulsion like mine for making things fit together, the amount of time required is easily doubled, trebled, and more. In the ego's perfect world I'd have planned to write a whole small book of grand new stuff - stories, poems, a radical review of the SM arts, a poignant collection of witty SM insights and aphorisms; but without a few months of clear writing time - a luxury as unlikely for me as winning the lottery - how on God's green Earth could I hope to fill all those pages?
One obvious answer was to reprint my favorite "Ask the Therapist" columns from the past five years, but many GP readers have seen most or all of those columns already; besides, even I couldn't read that much of my own grandmotherly advice at a single swoop. Another possibility was to publish that interminably long essay that's been languishing in my bottom drawer for the past few years while I waited to get up the head of creative steam I hoped might make it readable. But while I could argue that this was a great opportunity to make that sucker see the light of day, it was a sleazy sort of opportunity at best, where the term "opportunistic" felt more appropriate. I just couldn't find honor in foisting off what I regarded as second-class work.
I found the solution by which I resolved my dilemma while trying to answer a reader's "Ask the Therapist" question that seemed to demand more background than I usually provide, and that solution has taken form as the booklet you now hold in your hands: a collection I believe is thematically unified, allows me to respond to the column question with plenty of background, enables me to give you a preview of my latest book, lets me "out" my radical fairie persona, Princess Cruise, and permits me to introduce you to the writings of two of my very dearest, closest, best-loved friends.
The first piece following this Introduction, "Am I a Sexual Minority?" I have also taken as this chapbook's title. In one form or another the question seems to me to be something each of us must ask if we are to move toward real maturity, and the answer is not always as clear or simple as a person might hope or expect. I wrote "Am I a Sexual Minority?" as my prepared remarks for a panel discussion at the Western Regional Conference of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sex, now Sexuality (SSSS), in 1992, just after I'd stepped down as president of that organization's San Francisco chapter. That evening I was joined on the dais by Kat Sunlove, publisher of Spectator; James Green, president of FTM International, the world's largest female-to-male cross-gender organization; and our moderator, the author, columnist, teacher, and radical sex activist Carol Queen. In this essay and in this company I tried to prove that I was straight.
The second piece constitutes my reply to the "Ask the Therapist" question I mentioned above; I've included the question itself before the essay so that in some sense my column can keep running even in this unusual issue of GP. I began the reply, "The Myth of Sexual Addiction," as a response to Patrick Carnes's Out of the Shadows editor Layne Winklebleck asked me to write for Spectator in 1990. Out of the Shadows is the book that really gave the contemporary addictionology movement its start; by now that movement has become such a behemoth that opposing its fundamental ideology in the smallest of ways seems like one of those hopeless tasks mythological heroes could only accomplish with the aid of wizards or trolls. My review grew like Jack's beanstalk into something altogether different than I'd planned, which was far too long for a Spectator article. But after he heard me read an abbreviated version of the essay at another SSSS meeting Layne did run the shorter piece in two parts. In 1991 Ariadne Kane reprinted the entire essay in the Journal of Gender Studies, and it was subsequently batted around in several other forums as well.
Since I have a long-standing interest in erotic fiction but no time in which to write it, I've chosen to include here a piece my friend James Williams wrote that was published originally in Black Sheets. Thanks to publisher/editor Bill Brent for permission to reprint. I remember meeting James in 1976 or 1977 at one of the bath houses that were hot in San Francisco's disco days. He and I were cruising the same person - someone with whom James and not I had an encounter - and liked each other enough in the chase to stay in touch. James is fairly reclusive, his bath house past notwithstanding, and on a couple of occasions has asked me to stand in for him at public readings of his work. [James's work is not included in my Archive, of course, but he subsequently published the story I used in his first collection of fiction, . . . But I Know What You Want (San Francisco: Greenery Press, 2003 http://www.greenerypress.com), which I edited for him. James can be found at http://www.jaswilliams.com.]
When my body appears to a specific small coterie of friends, the persona using it is known as Princess Cruise. Fond of white lace, white feather boas, and large rhinestone earrings, Princess likes to hang with some of the radical fairies, and to write poetry - as I believe he also did some 30 years ago, publishing widely under my name. In one tiny corner of the world there is even an Annual Princess Cruise Memorial Poetry Reading, held each summer someplace when the sun don't shine. Among the poems of Princess's I've included here, two first appeared several years ago in On Wings of Leather and one was reprinted in Paramour. Others appear in print here for the first time.
To close out my special issue of GP I've included the personal introductions Sybil Holiday and I wrote for our book, Consensual Sadomasochism: How to Talk About It and How to Do It Safely (San Francisco and Los Angeles: Daedalus Publishing Company, 1996 http://www.daedaluspublishing.com)
For those few souls in Janus who may not know Sybil, she is a Clinical Hypnotherapist and a California Certified Safe Sex Educator who has been a member of the San Francisco leather community since before the Outcasts were founded, and a Janus member since the very early 1980s. As M. Cybelle she works as a professional dominant. A popular teacher at QSM and elsewhere, she was a supervisor on the San Francisco Sex Information (SFSI) phones for 2-1/2 years, and has made presentations at nearly every SFSI training for well over a decade. Sybil was interviewed as a Spectator cover girl and centerfold in the summer of 1996, she has been the subject of interviews by Lily Braindrop in the original Taste of Latex and in Real Sex by Julia Hutton (Cleis Press), and she, too, was profiled in Different Loving, by Gloria Brame, Will Brame, and Jon Jacobs (Villard). She is the author of essays on being a professional dominant and on "The Strict and Gracious Queen" that were published in the Sandmutopia Guardian in 1993 and 1999, and is co-author, with me, of one essay on erotic power play and another on erotic age regression. They were also published in Sandmutopia Guardian, the first serialized in 1991 and 1992, and the second in 1994. Sybil can be reached through her website at http://www.spiralway.com. As M. Cybelle she is at http://www.mcybelle.com
I, of course, am your friendly neighborhood psychotherapist and sex therapist, author or co-author of 15 books on a wide range of subjects from contemporary Latin American literature (1969) to classic jukeboxes (1981), a former university English instructor, and a former magazine editor. Jonathan Swift said more than two centuries ago that it was journalism's duty to delight and instruct. As a writer I've taken that notion as my creed for decades, so I trust that if you learn anything in these pages you will be entertained in the process and vice-versa. In any case, this is my opportunity to thank you for the honor I deem it to fulfill my obligation.
William A. Henkin
San Francisco, December, 1996
"... and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old...."
Jack Kerouac
The end of 1996 brought a series of profound changes to my life I had not anticipated when I started to put this chapbook together, including some that affected what went into the collection. While an Afterword is not the place I want to document or comment on those changes, it may be a good place to reflect on both the extent and the limits of one individual's power.
When I begin any action, from a writing a book to a doing a scene, I have a general plan in mind and lots of mental or material notes about specific items I want, expect, or hope to include before the adventure ends. My abilities to devise such an outline and carry it through express my power and creativity. They remind me of where, like all human beings, I share in the godhead, I am a god, the gods are alive in me. Here I learn to appreciate my pride.
But by the time I finish the action I have inevitably been derailed in some particulars small or large, and so the project never turns out exactly as I had imagined it would when I began. I don't mean the results are better, necessarily, or worse either, although I might feel one or the other to be the case. I just mean that my clearest expectations and most passionate intentions have been surpassed, disappointed, or otherwise unmet by events that are simply or functionally outside my control. These changes remind me of where, like all human beings - indeed, like the gods themselves - I am limited by forces that require my humility.
Over the years one of my favorite metaphors for the experience I'm describing has been the Road and its inescapable concomitant, the Journey. When I set out to go somewhere, whether I know the territory's map or not, the Road itself may bend and twist in ways I did not anticipate, and sometimes it takes me in directions I had not thought to go. But whether I like or do not like these changes, the Road and the Journey go on.
A little more than 200 years ago the Scots poet Robert Burns wrote that "The best-laid schemes o' mice and men Gang aft a-gley;/ An' lea'e us nought but grief and pain, For promised joy." His bleak belief that human plans generally change for the worse sounds grim as some blasted heath, but maybe Burns just planned for joy, and, by limiting his vision, doomed himself to disappointment. Does that mean that if he'd only planned for sorrow he'd have been happily surprised? I think not: Jacques, in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, thrives on sadness: he boasts that he sucks melancholy as a weasel sucks eggs, yet no surprises gladden his maudlin heart.
Perhaps, instead, the changes Burns felt as disappointment derived from that most human of conditions, expectation, and from its sisters, hope and fear. For surely it is in expectation that I lay out my schemes as if I were a god indeed, then on the Road I learn over and over again that any god a human can know must be one that walks the human way. As the Greek, Roman, Hindu, Norse, and other polytheistic civilizations have shown, the gods share our experiences of delight, upset, and bewilderment for they, like us, are residents on Earth; like us, they, too, plan; and when their schemes, like ours, go awry, they, too, are disappointed, gloomy, or enraged. Even the gods, it seems, are not enlightened.
And that's what makes the Journey, from the horse I'm mounted on: not that it goes where I want it to go, and not that it goes where I don't want it to go, either; not even that it goes somewhere, but that it is, like the Road itself, like the gods themselves, like you and me, so much like human animals - as my friend James writes in "Light" - we fool ourselves.
So whether you've read this far or simply skipped some years to reach this page, I ask you to accept my thanks again for the honor it has been to fulfill all my obligations.
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