by Jiz Lee
C: When I think about revealing things to you, I realize I was never afraid of telling you who I was. We’ve come to a point in our relationship as child and parent where nothing I say is going to shock you. Unless I told you I was pregnant.
M: The six months between when you came home from Michigan after being raped and when you decided to come out about that to me were such a struggle. I just didn’t know what was going on. I know it took a lot for you to tell me about that, and I’m glad you finally did because I just didn’t understand why you were being so angry and sad.
C: Revealing to you that I’m a rape survivor is absolutely the worst thing I’ve ever had to do.
M: It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever had to—I still tear up just thinking about it, that you had to go through that without proper support. I just always wondered why you couldn’t tell me sooner.
C: I couldn’t tell anybody sooner. That’s part of being a rape survivor—you don’t want to tell people because the consequences can be incredibly mentally destructive. For example, I can tell you a little bit of the fallout. After my stepbrother molested me, I was in ninth grade at high school—I had a boyfriend, and I broke up with him because I couldn’t imagine being anywhere near a guy anymore. Robby was very popular in our little ’90s alt-rock corner of the high school, and all my friends were like, why did you break up with him? My solid group of friends that I had for years no longer trusted me because I couldn’t tell them I was molested, and I couldn’t come up with a good lie. They caught me lying, and they all turned their backs on me. It was violent. I got death threats. I got outcast from my friends. They never came back to me; they never apologized; I never got a chance to tell them what really happened. It literally destroyed my life. I couldn’t trust anybody.
M: Yeah, and it made your subsequent time at that high school really impossible.
C: I talked about being a survivor at my keynote for the Feminist Porn Conference. How there’s such a stigma around porn stars and their upbringings. Sex workers are always trying to prove to the world that they’re not “damaged goods.”
M: I don’t think that you being a survivor turned you toward sex work. I always thought that it was some of the work that you did at Evergreen that got you curious about sex work. What you’re doing now just kind of seems like a natural progression of everything you’ve been curious about since about the age of sixteen or seventeen. There has been trauma in your life and you’ve handled it well, and I don’t think that the damage that you’ve experienced in your youth geared you toward sex work at all. It seems very natural to me.
C: A lot of things have changed for me since your twin daughters were born in 2011. I skipped the Feminist Porn Awards that year and spent that night with you, Heather, and the twins, and I read the Twitter feed for the awards show. I got to experience winning two film-making awards with my dad and my little sisters with me, and that is one of the times in our relationship as father and son that I have felt most loved by you. The pride of having a father that I could share that moment with, in the quiet peaceful darkness of this brand-new, gigantic family that we have. That was one of the most amazing nights of my life.
M: I’m so proud of the recognition that you’re getting. It’s good work that you do; it’s adding love to the universe.
C: When I was eighteen, I did not have any queer porn resources out there. Now there’s these eighteen-year-olds out there finding my work, images of queer sexuality that I didn’t have when I was growing up. It’s having quite an intense impact on queer youth.
M: Yes, I know! (Mateo has younger, queer friends who are total CT fangirls. It’s awkward and awesome.)
C: I know, your lesbian friends love me. And some day, my sisters are gonna be grown-ups, they’re gonna be women. If I can somehow make my art effective in making queer sexuality more acceptable, and making femaleness more acceptable, if I can somehow change people’s perception about all the things that we have to come out about in the first place, maybe my little sisters can grow up and be queer or straight or kinky or poly or boys or girls or whatever the fuck they want, and maybe I can help make that a reality for them, that acceptance, through the work I do now.
I see part of my responsibility as an artist is to leave a legacy that will make it easier for folks like me to become happy and healthy adults—especially those who aren’t as lucky to have had a queer-friendly family like mine.
M: You will, and Heather and I will be right there with you as well. We are going to try to avoid that shame curtain that adults seem to put on their kids. Children at age three have no shame. They’re very much in love with their bodies and play imaginary games where they are boys or are girls. They play act the gender roles of men and women already. They play act like they might have a penis, and they aren’t getting told not to do that.
I think, in my mind, ideally, they would go to seventh- and eighth-grade OWL, and they would come home and over dinner we would be talking about it and I would say, “Well, you know, by the way, Courtney’s a sex worker. They make queer porn, and they’re one of the tops in their genre. They make art and do important things that teach people and also make them happy.” I think that would just be a pleasant, nonoppressive conversation. And hopefully, they would say, “Oh wow, that’s cool,” and maybe want to talk to you about it.
C: I imagine I should be there for that.
M: Oh, you could be there! You can’t always plan it like that. The questions always come up when you are least expecting them.
C: I’ll remember to be present around seventh or eighth grade!
M: Or they’ll say, “Daddy says our sister’s famous. Let’s Google her!”
C: I clearly don’t agree that any of my family members should see any of my work that I’m performing in, but I’m proud of my art and I guess it’s comforting that I can share those feelings with my family.
Thank you so much for being open, and being a good dad, and really taking all of this very seriously. I think our story is an inspiration to parents because so much of the shame around sex comes from our parents, and the more that we can share with the grown-ups how to talk to the kids and how to educate the kids and remove that prejudice, not allow that prejudice to take form in children, it’s so important.
M: Yeah. It is important.
C: One last question. Do you remember how I came out to you as gay?
M: I don’t think you needed to come out. I kind of just noticed that you were starting to like girls, and I was like, oh, I know this!
C: I feel very lucky to have been raised in a queer-positive, sex-positive upbringing. There are a lot of people out there who grew up in a lot more repressed households, and I’m very thankful for the opportunities I was given growing up to be myself. You did a really good job. And thank you for loving me just as much as an adult.
M: That’s so cool. Aw. I love you very much. I’m glad you’re happy and doing what you love.
C: I love it. I’m so happy. You now know everything. I have nothing else to report, and I feel really trusted and loved. Thanks for letting me be shameless, Dad!
M: You’re welcome!
THE MECHANISM OF DISAPPEARING TO SURVIVE
Cyd Nova
Cyd Nova is a writer and community organizer living in Oakland, California. He works at St. James Infirmary, a peer-run clinic for sex workers, and is the director of gay FTM porn company Bonus Hole Boys. He has spent over a decade trying out every nook and cranny the sex industry has to offer. Cyd’s writing has appeared in Tits and Sass, The Rumpus, Visual AIDS, Prose and Lore, and The Collection: The New Transgender Vanguard. You can read more at CydNova.wordpress.com or email him at [email protected].
On the day I came out to my dad as transgender, somebody jumped in front of the train before mine and we stayed stalled in between stations for twenty minutes. Neither my dad nor I had cell phones in 2009, so I couldn’t tell him I was running late. The anxiety grabbing ahold of my guts made reading my book impossible, so I sat
looking at the second hand tick on my watch, trying to breathe evenly.
Dad and I had been living in different countries for the last two years. I had seen him a week before, the first time he’d stopped in town on his way to find a new home in the Midwest for himself and my stepmother. That time, we’d gone to my sister’s house, and I watched all of my nephews play baseball and all the women sip cocktails and all the men barbeque. My dad and I stood next to each other for a photograph, and he grabbed my arm and asked me why I looked so muscular. I told him I’d taken up boxing and tried to speak in a soft, feminine voice.
The train finally reached the airport. I paced through the terminal, looking for him, my head full of static. I saw him standing in front of a baggage counter. He’s the same height as me, well-worn clothes, an old cowboy hat on—the same model he wore when I was a child. We started walking toward each other and then, when we were less than ten feet away, I knew. The set of his mouth told me that this would not be an idle chat. I was not prepared, although I’d done nothing to prevent this conversation from happening, and even planned on the possibility of bringing it up. Ultimately, my hope had been to let my body be and pray that people would continue to see what they wanted to see, and that maybe a switch in understanding would spontaneously happen without the use of words.
Instead, he led me to one of the seats next to the sliding glass doors that kept sweeping open and asked me, “Do you think you’re a man? Is that why you are doing this to your body?” This referred to taking hormones. I was impressed that he even knew that taking testosterone was a thing; I didn’t until a couple years ago. I looked at the ground. I did not know how to answer his questions in a rational way.
Why did I think I was a man? I had cut off all my hair and started the journey toward male as more of a compulsion, something I had to do to find some goddamn peace in my mind. Any answer I could give seemed nonsensical, and under his gaze, womanly. I didn’t want to cry, and I also didn’t know how to explain that within my queer sex-worker community, all this makes sense! I knew he couldn’t understand my roadmap, but I promise, I have one.
To say that would have been to admit to more things that make me sound more messy and delusional. I felt like a liability, a problem, a freak. After a while, the conversation devolved into nothing. We talked about a hike he took that left him lost in the desert without water. He hadn’t told anyone where he was going and it was over a hundred degrees; the rocks were hot and flat and went forever. Eventually, he ran into someone who led him to a road, otherwise he might have died. He’s getting to be an old man, my dad. In 2009, he was sixty-nine. We drank milkshakes together and waited for his flight to arrive. We didn’t talk much. Six years later, we still don’t.
Emails at Christmas and birthdays. I talk about my dog, about nice walks I go on, not much else. My friend suggests that I send my parents a package of envelopes postmarked for the next twenty years, in each one a card that simply says, “I am alive and am behaving in an economically responsible fashion,” and save myself the angst of figuring out what’s acceptable three times a year.
This book isn’t about coming out as trans; it’s about coming out as a porn star, so let me back up—but they are not as disconnected as it might seem. Long before I came out as trans, I covered my tracks around sex work with a similar kind of gracelessness. I started turning the odd trick or two at seventeen, but got into it for real around the age of twenty.
My parents and I had never been very close. I’d stopped living with them full time around the age of fourteen, so they were never the first people I was going to tell when I started stripping. Especially since it became such a good thing. Through my job in a strip club, which challenged my previous concept of how unclean a place of business—especially nude business—could possibly be allowed to continue operating, I had found total happiness.
Growing up, I felt like a burden. Sex work made me feel powerful and independent. My body was a tool that gave me money and attention, and people were greedy for the chance to be near it. The people I met in the sex industry felt like a real family—messed-up girls who had drug problems and laughed too hard and spread menstrual blood on the peep-show booths when motherfuckers didn’t pay. Working in the sex industry from a place of force and suffering would have been acceptable, perhaps; jobs to them are supposed to be hard. But how do you tell your semiconservative parents that faking lesbian sex for the camera makes you feel better than fucking anyone you’ve ever loved?
I needed to talk about it though, so I told everyone else. It was the best thing that had ever happened to me. From a punk background, I went about it the only way I knew how—organizing activist groups, leading workshops at festivals, writing zines about the surreal world that I had made my home. Eventually, sex work became almost everything about me, and if you didn’t know I was a sex worker, there wasn’t much to know. When my parents rejected me, yes, it was because I was transgender and weird and too much for them to handle, but also it was because they’d stopped knowing me a long time ago and they knew it. They probably know I am a sex worker too, but why bring it up?
In 2011, 15,000 porn performers’ legal names were released on a website. Mine was among them, but that is hardly the point. As a minor player at that point in the porn industry, my biography simply labeled me a pornographic whore. Others had their home addresses, family members, and details of their health statuses published on the Internet. I heard of people being stalked. Of families who loved their children one week, the next week telling them they were the spawn of Satan. I heard of people getting fired from their straight jobs or just treated like foreign objects until they quit. I’m a counselor at a sex worker clinic, so all these stories came to me but weren’t mine to tell. All these parents and employers and, more than anything, those douchebag men-children who decided to fuck with thousands of people to feel powerful—I want to take them over my knee and spank them. I want to shake them. Sometimes I cried, but it’s not about any one experience. Just because it’s so terrifying to hear that someone decides to no longer love another person because of the job that they do, or the people they love, or their decision to change their body because of something inside.
This is the real grip of the painful coming-out narrative. It interrupts the concept that certain types of love are unconditional. In our society, it is considered acceptable for someone’s family to decide to take away their love for their child because of a choice they make. To make a lie that they will protect you, forgive your mistakes, watch you make your own choices, and try to mediate for you the cruelty of consequences. In my heart, I want to only believe that they might be angry, disappointed, or frustrated, but ultimately, family is family and should be each other’s home. To learn this isn’t true is one of the hardest lessons.
Here is the flipside of the resentment and betrayal: Not having my parents in my life provides me with definite, tangible benefits. Although I miss many types of support—grounding, life context, financial assistance—I do get freedom. I have no responsibility to make sure the boundaries of my life do not transgress past the limitations of acceptability to family, so I have been able to be as out and loud as I want. Recently, I started a porn company, one of the few in the world that have gay content of trans men and cis men fucking. I try to get my name and pictures in as many places as possible because I am the face of a business and that business includes me being naked, smiling, a cock in each hole. I do so, knowing the unlikelihood of our worlds intersecting, and if perchance they do—well, there isn’t much to threaten me with at this point. I feel lucky, and even privileged, to have no leverage against being who I am. Because of this, I have been able to speak up about sex worker activism and say things that would have too many consequences for those with biological families.
Often, I don’t think about my parents at all. But recently I’ve been dreaming about them. In these dreamscapes, we talk honestly. I tell them about what the last decade has been like for me—starting with the nude pic
tures I took on a whim for a trucker magazine and the resulting discomfort of hitchhiking to owning a porn company, struggling to figure out how to adjust the skills of an employee to a business owner. My dad is gruff, tells me that if I want to succeed I have to stop dicking around and focus, like he wanted me to do with school. My stepmother does not want to talk about it and continues chopping vegetables for the meal we are about to make, but there is a smile that seems to be playing at the corner of her mouth.
These dreams stay with me for a week, and after a while I can’t stop myself from staying up till 3:00 a.m. looking at YouTube videos of my old hometown. Googling a street view of my old high school and cruising around the parking lot that I used to stand in, hot and dirty, waiting for the bus and thirty minutes of childhood social-order torment. After I look at every picture ever taken of my small rural town, I move to searching for traces of my stepmother on the Internet. I find pictures of her with a class of fourth graders. We have not seen each other for seven years, and I assumed that when saw her, she would look foreign to me. But she doesn’t. Her face is preserved with the timelessness of farm women’s bodies. Handsome. She looks like someone who gets up and rides horses at 6:00 a.m. and can throw a bale of hay ten feet. I feel proud of her, looking at that photo; my anger falls to the side and I remember what a badass she is. I allow myself to think of the possibility of reunion, something that has long since felt like an attainable future.
Here is my wish: that freedom/duplicity was not the choice I felt I had to take. Coming out as a sex worker, especially as an adult film worker—so available for dismemberment in the public eye—could be something else. Not an evidence of parental or personal failing. Not a source of enjoyment that feels it should be downplayed as a source of shame. Not a conversation that can never happen between parent and child because to admit that a child has a sexual body is obscene. I wish I’d felt like I could have had them celebrate that I finally felt in control of myself as a sex worker, and then as a trans man that I finally felt whole as a human being. That the privilege to talk honestly about our lives should be assumed to be for those with nothing else to lose. To be a sex worker, an activist, a trans person, and a good child.
