By Michelle O'brien
submission for Bound to Struggle
Yes," it’s more a breath then a word, a sigh I let out as she slides the needle into my shoulder. Its pain bites, twists around my trace of voice. I feel the pain wrapping itself tightly around the intake of breath and then releasing, uncoiling as I moan. I feel her fingers trace lines on my neck, the cool metal thread of another needle gracing my cheek before she runs it through the cartilage of my ear. This time it grabs me, lines of sensation running out and across my body. These needles, their pain is staking out a new map, creating a new terrain on this surface of my body, creating in its wake new flesh and new hope. And somehow, in the midst of this transformation, this restructuring of my flesh and its possibilities, I am beginning to find myself.
Next to the bed she has set my sharps container, nearly full of my 21 gauge hormone syringes. In the morning I will bike down to the needle exchange, chat with my friends that work the Saturday site, and get a new pack of points. I know the exchange workers from my volunteering with them, from social service organizing in town, and occasionally from dyke parties. Unfortunately, the exchange doesn’t carry needles for play piercing.
I spent the winter of Y2K in Minneapolis. The winter was cold, as they always are. Vicious winds whipped through streets and sidewalks, grabbing our bundled bodies, leaving the tiny ice scars on the surface of our faces and eyes. It was an exciting time. I had spent the spring before traveling in anarchist and communist squats on the continent in Europe. In Rome, an autonomist told me to link arms as we charged a US embassy, hitting a line of the squat Carabinieri vans. In Barcelona, I watched police cars turn and drive away, as we spread out across a blocked highway, chanting "You take our homes, we take your streets!" in Catalan. In London I sat with Greek anarchists for days behind a high barricade of classroom desks; watching the campus security guards outside parole our student protest turned siege. When I returned to the States, things were changing quickly. N30 hit in Seattle, and for the first time I began to seriously imagine the ways street militancy might allow us to seize, hold and defend our dear, beloved cities.
Through that winter I organized street protest trainings, teaching kids the tactics I had learned in Europe and Seattle. We practiced breaking police lines, sucking people back into crowds, staying linked and staying strong. We were preparing ourselves for A16 in DC, for the upcoming May Day in Minneapolis, for fantasies of mass street insurrection.
We were training our bodies to protest. Our trainings were rooms full of bodies but not just any bodies. These workshops shared the demographics of too many of the protests of that year -- they were mostly white kids, the young middle class that could afford an arrest or two, able-bodies who could run if it came to that, bodies that were not visibly trans or queer. We trained rooms full of bodies to stand against the police and defend each other, to meet power with a certain privileged, almost naive courage.
We enlisted our bodies for high-profile battles of street protests, while less visible wars waged across other kinds of bodies. During 1999 and 2000, construction workers were building a new downtown Hennepin County jail; not to house protesters, but the bodies of young black, native and Latino men. One Minneapolis public school librarian, a trans woman named Debra Davis, faced the wrath of transphobic parents and administrators over her right to use a bathroom. Within the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Local 17, immigrant activists led a successful campaign to change the national AFL-CIO’s official stance on the rights of immigrants; while they fought off a brutal alliance of the INS and hotel owners. And in the streets of Minneapolis, like in cities across the world, many faced daily harassment regardless of any protest. Sex workers, trans people, drug users, homeless people and others fought a constant battle for survival, against poverty, hatred, violence and police harassment. Wars over bodies: their survival, their control, their movement, their visibility, and their worth.
While organizing street protests, jail solidarity and lock downs, I was also in another struggle; one I wasn’t talking much about. I was dating, and at 21 had one of my first remotely functional sexual relationships. At the time, most read me as a fag, a boy, and a bit odd. My girlfriend was a butch queer woman who liked me, in part, because she read me as femme. In our sex, our day to day moments together, I began to unravel years of confused anxiety, a tangled mess of incomprehensibility that wrapped itself around my body. Slowly, I began to heal from years of trauma; from an alienation from my body and self so massive and deep I couldn't begin to grasp it. I found new ways of understanding and reading my body, new possibilities glimpsed in a pleasurable caress, in our flirtatious exchanges. Sometime early in that winter I began to seriously consider the possibility that I was a woman.
"How bad do you want it? Come on bitch, tell me, how bad do you want it?"
"So bad." Her voice is coarse, desperate, saturated with desire. I tug the scarf tightly, tying her wrist restraints to the metal rings that surround my bed. I run the suede of the flogger across her back and thighs, listening to her breath quicken. She bends her knees, and her ass is in the air. Her hair is wet with sweat, dangling over her face. She is waiting with an intensity that fills the room, an intensity that I can feel across the surface of my own skin. An intensity I never imagined I would experience, through a brief lifetime of hating this body.
She wants me. She really wants me. And it has so little to do with what’s between my legs...
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