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Not above being accidentally racist and then feeling absolutely horrible and apologetic about it. Start with what you know. What is going on in your life right now. Take stock. This is masculinity. Being in touch with what is going on inside of you. Being 100% present 100% of the time, as Maya Angelou suggests. She was one smart cookie. A genius. Like Nawal El Saadawi and Gloria Steinem and Andrea Dworkin and Clarice Lispector and and and… I am sick of gay curators masquerading as inclusive when they just play the institutional game. It’s amazing to me the way that gay men in particular make full use of their patriarchal privilege. It’s all about how you are on a one to one level to each other, one humyn being to another. And most art is simply not about that or not with that as a premium. I tend to think that this other sort of art is just business and I blame Mr. Warhol for opening that can of worms.

I have always been a sort of “alternative” (cis) male / possessor-of-penis and have presented as male except when I am wearing a wig and a dress. Never makeup. Never padding. Once in a while earrings. Hair accessories. Tights. Very very slight almost not there eye makeup, bronzer or metallic copper lipstick but usually I have done this when not with a wig and a dress. I have always been incredibly annoyed by men but find them and their penises irresistibly attractive. I have been reverent to certain penises, almost disregarding the man and his behavior. Genitals are a funny thing. Womxn on the other hand have always enthralled me with their intellect and intelligence but are not a sexual turn on. I disagree with people who say men cannot be eye candy, but eye candy (especially when younger) I generally don’t want to fuck. And by fucking I mean circlusion, a word coined by Bini Adamczak to mean the flesh around the penetrating object as having the power. This goes back to Carolee Schneemann’s researches into vulvic and vaginal space. I love my anus. Everything about it, and I love coupling it with other men’s penises and tongues. Sometimes fingers, rarely dildo’s. I prefer the real somewhat softer but still turgid thing. I feel like a male Andrea Dworkin or Jo Spence which makes me John Stoltenberg or Terry Dennett. “Oppositional Art” was how Jo Spence called it. Oppositional to the patriarchy. Simply put.

When I was about 14 or so I went on a Boy Scout camping trip in Kansas, near Topeka where I grew up. It was very dark. Out in the middle of nowhere. T.H. and I went out into the woods with flashlights. I have no idea how I arranged it. Because it was surely my initiative. We stood on a wooden sort of “stage”, a raised platform, side by side, and jerked off to “see who could cum farther.” In the dark. When we had both come we shone our flashlights brightly on the small tree / bush / shrub branches in front of the platform where we stood side by side with our pants and underwear down. My cum had gone off into space, I think, but his….I remember seeing his cum hanging bright and white like a glorious spiderweb in the dark, dripping from the tree branches and I wanted nothing more than to reach out and catch it on my fingers and put those same fingers with the cum in my mouth. The moon shone brightly which helped illuminate his precious sperm. Even more than the sperm I wished I had been able to witness his whole process, and to help, with my hand and mouth.

Tania Bruguera has the phrase to describe art works, “Arte Útil”, “Useful Art” (https://arte-util.org/about/). The description of what she finds useful art is on her website in detailed steps and points. One of her former students is the artist Carlos Martiel who lives now I think in New York, having lived in and studied with Tania in Cuba where they both come from. He deals in his performances in abjection (abjection=repulsion / desire) and I find them / the work / the performances / the statements both sublime and perfect. Just what we need now. Leaning into a kind of erotic abjection which more than anything else reeks of positivity and hope. Lots of his work can be found online because he is very successful / visible. Brave and courageous and organically perfect. He is providing both a mirror and a critique and a celebration and a profound humynistic existential statement, all at the same time.

John Stoltenberg is the surviving partner of Andrea Dworkin, who had it all figured out. The school of hard knocks. John wrote books like Refusing to be a Man already back in 1989, the same seminal year that Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term intersectional. The full title of John’s book is Refusing to be a Man: Essays on Social Justice. In workshops, Stoltenberg had male participants get into the poses of womxn in pornographic films and magazines. To feel how vulnerable and exposed they felt. To make a point. I really wonder who the men were in those workshops and if they were the men who actually needed to be in a workshop like that. I often imagine that the old guard masculinity is totally inflexible, like a Golem made of concrete, a stiff wooden man, or just any old piece of inflexible rusted steel (R. Serra). These men are incapable of putting themselves in anybody else’s position, except the higher and higher money grabbing power hungry positions that they aspire to. Men also in general have much lower pain thresholds than womxn. A friend told me on the phone today that there have been studies done where men (I almost typed “mean”) were subjected to the level of pain that some womxn go through every month during and prior to menstruation. Most of the men in the experiment were crying from pain very quickly into the exercise.

On a side note, I am not afraid of dying, I think, as Maya Angelou said if you live a fully present life 100% of the time then you have nothing to fear. I agree and try to emulate this. Dealing with embodied privilege can be dealt with through positive forms of transgression and being aware of all behaviors of one’s days on a micro level absolutely 100% of the time. I work all the time and do not need to be paid for it. Well I do and I don’t. Being present 100% of time is living a truly political and politicized life. Most men live at about a 15% level of awareness of their own behavior and its effects on others. Just read Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex or Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics. If you really want to dig deep and go into dodgy territory exploring different kinds of class systems, read Monique Wittig’s The Straight Mind and Other Essays from 1992. Her work connects with and precursors Marlon Riggs’s films and Essex Hemphill’s poetry. I am saying mainly that the work happened in parallel, Monique was just significantly older than these other two pioneers.

But veganism is the thing, the elephant in the room. Look closely at what artist Sue Coe has done. Her work is so perfect that it made it into the mainstream in more slightly watered down versions like Sue Williams’s graphic paintings of the 1990’s. Sue Coe is an activist artist who is truly activist. She is one of my all time favorites. The only way we are ever going to get anywhere as a people and a planet is if we stop exploiting other living creatures, and this includes honey, wool, silk, LEATHER, FUR, all forms of animal based dairy and cheese, butter, any kind of animal and sea life meat. We just can’t justify this anymore. T.H.’s sperm may have died unnecessarily on those moonlit Kansas shrub branches, but that is a living DNA chunk produced by our own bodies and no matter what religion might have us believe we are in charge of our own bodies and our own destinies. https://www.suecoe.com is Sue Coe’s website. Social justice. Käthe Kollwitz of our times. Plus. Extra. Sue is born in 1951 and this gives me hope.

I believe we are all “they” as a pronoun. It is a simple fact that no one is one thing or another on the gender and sexuality continuum. I know a lot of people think I’m not political but I am as aware as fuck of the artist community I exist in and no living artist does what Sue Coe has done and is doing. She precursors where we need to be right now. She is the new masculinity and the future. When I say the new masculinists are hungry for femininity I must include those also outside of the queer circles I usually exist in. Heterosexuals still need the right to exist, although frankly I think that ‘same sex’ / homosexual partnerships are the future. Allies. It must be hell to be heterosexual. Confusing and I don’t envy heterosexuals one bit. I regret that in this essay I name names without going very deep into specific bodies of work. These are clues. Seeds. Scattered for you to search out, dear reader.

The same friend, my best friend, when we spoke on the phone this afternoon, says the modern male who looks for companionship with womxn is confused between an earnest, no-frills type of womxn and a sort of pin-up fantasy that has existed for eons. The truth of womxn lies in-between. Has the world ever been any different? Has it even ever changed since the times of cave people when we were running around beating each other over the head with large sticks? I believe there is a subtle shift happening, a tilt, a soft slide into something akin to what Monica Sjöö painted in her painting God Giving Birth from 1968. Something is changing. I am hopeful for the future when I speak to young people. The numbers of those interested in true social and ethical and moral justice are rising.

Justice. A word not to be underestimated. Balance. Harmony. Even in the sort of dissonance living on the planet entails. And I am not saying I have it right, but I am trying to “recalibrate” at every step. Damage control. “Resource / demonstration / example” (my phrasing) leading to “Information / dissemination / reception”.

Artificial Intelligence on the African continent as Manthia Diawara is exploring in his recent filmic work. Technology is not an enemy. Animal consumption and exploitation is shooting ourselves in our own feet. A true enemy that needs urgent attention. This holocaust has gone on for far too long.