He pinned me against the wall. Hot energy came out of his fingertips as his lips met mine.  Tongues tangled in our bedroom as he reached down and felt my cock, hard, hanging down between my legs. I was held back by my underwear and trousers, but felt him exquisitely. We breathed in together, released, pushed back… and I felt him reach his tendrils into me, through me, grabbing me and pulling me closer with every tug.

I packed a while ago. Packing- wearing a prosthetic under clothing to create the look or sensation of having external genitalia. Some people’s packers are silicone. Others rubber. I was in love with someone whose packer was made of layers of condoms filled with hair gel and wrapped in a nylon. Let’s just say that that went poorly when someone squeezed too tight.

I recently got a silicone packer from Good Vibes. It showed up beautiful- the caramel color really resonating with me. But wow, it was hard. Physically very hard. It threw me for a loop, having been used in the past to much softer packers. Mind you, that made it more fun for using as an insertable on myself… but that is a tale for a different time. I wore it that first night and found that it was hard to sleep in, pulling on my long public hair. In the morning I blearily removed it, without thinking.

During the second round of experiments, I put it in my trousers, and found that the lump was more ambitious than what I perceived myself to be in my energetic and astral body. And yet, it was good, so good, to look down and see my cock between my legs, held back by jeans. So amazingly good. I wore it for a few hours, then decided to take it out before bed.

We have a mirror just inside our bedroom, and as I stripped… my world fell apart. I pulled down my underwear, and my packy came away from my groin.

Flashback. I am in Portland, Oregon at Powell’s Bookstore in the men’s room. I have not had chest surgery yet, my 38DD breasts held back behind a binder and wearing baggy clothes. I pull down my pants and my packy of the time, goes bouncing out of my underpants. I leave the stall, pick it up as if nothing was wrong… but it was all wrong.

My old packy was great. Soft. Beautiful. And it’s issue… was that it was practically shredded by me (or my lover) pulling on it too much.  An issue that the new packer does not have.

But I am now back in my bedroom… and my world falls apart. Because I look in the mirror, and I am beyond naked. I am bare. I am exposed. I am standing there, unable to see the cock I so badly want and need on my body.

I fall into dysphoria, and dance into depression. I curl up, and don’t want to leave the bed.  I spend the next few weeks on and off looking in the mirror and feeling wrong. And yet, packing is not enough either. I pack from time to time, and it helps. But my world feels sideways.

The third time is a charm. I slide the cock into my underpants, adjust myself, adjust myself again. I feel firmly grounded. I walk with firmness on the planet.  My love sees me, and as I flirt with him, he flirts back.

Around the corner in the bedroom his fingers graze against my cock and I shutter. He smiles, playing me like a violin, and I moan. His body pushes against mine and he begins to pull on my cock, but physically and astrally.

I shutter and moan, moan and squirm, squirm and shutter. He is an artisan of erotic expression, an incubus with silken claws. I groan and push back but he is relentless. I build up. I ache. I cum.

6 months ago I tried to attend the first of this groundbreaking series of events in San Francisco. I tried to get the time off, the flights scheduled… and it was simply not meant to be. Body Electric has been around for many years. I remember a lover of mine 15 years ago singing their praises from when he attended and helped then facilitate a number of the men’s body electric events. I considered back then attending the women’s events, but it did not feel right.  They debuted BDSM connection weekends, but by then I had been in the kink community for a while, and again, it did not feel right.

But when, 6 months ago, the queer event came on the radar, my spirit perked up. The workshop description starts:

Your gender. Your body. Your energy. Your beautiful self. How often has the world tried to force you into the gender binary, asked you to assure it that your pronouns matched what it saw rather than what you felt, required that your genitals conform to expectations, demanded that you deny the complexity of all that is you?

What if you could come into a community in which all expressions were possible? Where gender, sexuality and expression were aligned according to your truth? Where no one assumed what parts would go where? Welcome to Out of the Boxes: Celebrating the Queer Body Erotic!

The workshop is not just for queer, genderqueer, trans, or gender non-conforming individuals. That is what I love about it. It is about exploring body wisdom… something I have needed to reconnect with as of late. My body dysphoria has been pretty bad. My connection with my body has been… not what I desire. So this is perfect for me, perfectly timed, perfect.

I look forward to making new connections there, and connecting with those I already know. And ya know what- I hear there are still some tickets left It will be in NYC May 18-20, how perfect is that?

The work of Body Electric is to help people enhance their sense of eros, explore their potential, create community and experience intimacy, acceptance and inspiration.

Now THAT is a mission statement I can stand behind.

I made this Wordle to remind me. What drives me in my career and connections. A sense of the sacred. A connection to passion. Sensuality, self-love, and identity.

And above all else… love.

Outside the grey has gathered. I am so grateful I got to get here early rather than being out there in the weather. Back corner of the restaurant I am out of the way, and I am delighted for the down time. It is an hour I needed to clear my head and step away from the world. Such a great gift indeed.

I have missed Zahava. Even though we have only known each other for a year and a half, she makes my spirit sing. Powerful, beautiful, wise. Attending a class of hers I cried in a corner, silently.

We each have capacity, she explained, lifting up a glass of water. It was a small glass. We each have capacity.

But some of us have more capacity. She lifts up a second glass. Pouring one glass into another. She explains how some of us with more capacity can run dry and need more to fill us back up. That those with less can take on energy in tantra and other ecstatic experiences and find themselves overflowing and unable to process the deluge. I pull away to the side and watch other students engage in physical exercises, while tears roll silently.

Our conversation over a vegetarian sampler plate dances across the stars. Power exchange. Love. Relationships. Work. Collaboration.

Hope. Dreams. History. Race. New opportunities. Beauty. Fear. Connection.

We dance between them all, and scoop up another bite of colorful food with bread squishing between our fingers.

I laugh and say I have a need to control my room when I teach. I have an agenda, and though we may snake between points, I want to hit my core points. Students read a class description and deserve to get what they signed up for.

Let me start at the bottom of the mountain, and hike a variety of different paths- but by the end of the night we need to have made base camp. If we don’t, we can’t scale the mountain.

She laughs, chimes ringing in the air.

Quizzically I look back at her from across the table.

She says she is the kind of instructor that goes “ooh, look at this tree.”

I laugh out loud.

But it is true. I want you to get to base camp. And yes, it means sometimes I have to break away from the tangent and say “we have a mile and a half to hike before sundown, come on folks!”

And yet, talking with Zahava, I realize I have a middle ground to reach. Let me learn how to find base camp, and yet stop to truly FEEL the trees, not just see them as we go by.

The trees deserve it, and so do we.

Even as we reach base camp, together.

Enjoy!

• Beyond Bowed Heads: Rituals for Dominance and Submission
• FTM CBT: Genital Torment for Queer Bodies
  
• Kissing Cousins: Diverse Age Play and Familial Roles in Kink
• Pain is Inevitable, Suffering is Optional: Pain Processing Techniques
• Sacred Kink: The Eightfold Paths of BDSM and Beyond
• Service that Actually Serves US
• Sir! Yes Sir! Exploring, Developing, Implementing and Enforcing Protocols
• Taking the Lead: Human Animal Owning and Training

Or are we? What we see reflected in their eyes is not always the entirety of our truth. It is a truth better and more refined, more stylized than who we are. And why is that? It is because they see the projection we internally long to put out to the world. That us that we want to be.

They reflect back in with their eyes the person we long to be, and we tumble head over heels. This is not a bad thing. Far from it. Seeing ourselves idealized can help us rise up and become that person, feel what it is like to be that person because there it is. There it is in their eyes. We see our potential and are invigorated.

The same is true in reverse. Looking upon our beloved, we see their potential. We see them for who they seem to be, who they might be, who they have the potential of being. They look into our eyes and see the reflection of these things, and love erupts.

We fall in love with ourselves. Ourselves personified in the eyes of another, combined with the individual we see before us. We fall in love, and this is beautiful.

From this place we rise into love. We build cathedrals from the ground on up. The arches twine up into the air, buttresses holding up stained glass and dreams yet to be shared. This new relationship becomes an architectural wonder between the individuals involved.

One day we look, and we fall in love with the relationship itself. We marvel at the cathedral that has been built by the two amazing personified individuals, and see manifest the greatness of who we indeed are. Here stands proof that we are the beings we saw in each other, for only these beings can possibly have the capability to build such a wonder.

These are wonders. We fall in love, we rise into love, we construct in love. And we slowly unravel the layers of each other beneath the mirrors of our lives. Or, in some cases, quickly we find that every mirror has a backing on it and something rests behind that mirror. In some cases, what we find matches who and what we have behind our own mirror. In others, there may be struggles and grief. We sorrow at the loss of the perfect person we thought we knew… but more than that we struggle with and mourn the loss of the perfect person we saw in their eyes.

The earthquake hits the cathedral, and we realize that though we built up, and up, and up… we never dug down.

We never laid the groundwork for this artifice of wonder. This cathedral of grand dreams. We did not dig down into the dirt and muck and grime to lay the foundation for our wonders.

It may take years for the cathedral to crumble, or a cataclysm can shake it to the earth. At this moment, when the cathedral falls, a transformation takes place. The architects of this wonder can walk away. In doing so they can mourn who they thought they knew, and try to rebuild themselves back into the mirror others can see as perfect. They can walk away and be a shattered mirror, fearful to let anyone see them lest they see only the ruin of monuments past, cutting themselves off from the world. Or they can dig down into love.

Whatever route is taken, a transformation has taken place. An alchemical process begins. The shape of what is to come is no longer the shape of what was.

If the route to dig down into love is taken, there may yet be mourning first. The nostalgia stands there and we cling to it. We try to rebuild on the dirt, we try to build back up what was, or we dream of it. But when we hold onto the nostalgia of our past, we can not embrace the possibilities of our future. Both our hands are full of the rubble and pieces of the puzzle. We can not reach over and grab shovels with our love and begin to dig in. If my eyes are fixated on the rubble, I can not look my love in the eyes and begin to dream our next creation.

This can be especially hard if only half of the structure has fallen. If we believe we can rebuild with no foundation below us, for we can not see the folly of our ways. In this place we can still dig down. Basements can be excavated and foundations can be poured, even if we are still living in the building of our dreams. It is possible, but it is hard work. Hard, dirty, sweaty work. Work of the souls, and sometimes as we continue to live in our grand work, we might resent the rubble and construction. And yet, to stop the building from collapsing all the way, we need to dig into love.

How deep we dig, the foundations we lay down, the steel we girder our relationship with, will determine how high we can go. If we plan to raise up a new cathedral of passion, we must dig deep.

And yet, do we need to build high? We can build wine cellars and subbasements, winding twists and turns of this thing called us, and never build above the ground beyond a floor or two. From the outside we may seem like simple ranch houses, or sprawling geodesic dome compounds. We do not have to build cathedrals atop our strong foundations.

Culture tells us that cathedrals, skyscrapers, and towering temples hold great value, and so we fall in love, rise in love, let love carry us higher and higher. The air gets thin. We become light-headed and truly high in this place.

But we have choices of the shape our love will take.

We have choices.

We can build the Taj Mahal or a cottage in the woods. We can build the pyramids of Giza or a row house in the city. We have choices… and no choice is better than another. It is a matter not of what culture says is the best shape of relationship, but of what structure will serve those who are in love.

We can fall in love. We can rise in love. We can dig into love.

We can lift each other up from the holes we fall into. We can ground ourselves to be safe as we rise up. We can come equipped to dig.

And when we see ourselves in their eyes, warts and all, we can still learn to love what we see in their eyes.

It is never too late to dig a foundation, and never too late to transform into the structure of our dreams. We may need to deconstruct a bit to get there. There may be dust on the ground and it may feel like we are crumbling with the rubble of construction around us. But if we work together, we can build our dreams.

By looking forward, and working, together.

In 2002 when I launched RopeLover.com, it was an exciting project. I had been a sex blogger (back when I called them internet journals) since 1998, and my bandwidth was costing me too much money. I had been doing porn since the end of 1999, and decided to take the content I had been building up and launch my own adult site.

It was a small project at first, but it grew. And grew. At one point I had 10,000+ images, plus audio, video and of course, my journal.  It was a lot of fun.

I retired RopeLover.com in 2007 after my gender transition from female to male. Though I could have followed in the footsteps of BuckAngel.com, I made a choice not to become a female to male porn star. I had transitioned into being a sexuality author (with such books as Shibari You Can Use, Sacred Kink, and the Toybag Guide to Ageplay), speaker, photographer and performance artist.

It has been a delight to have this group, but since 2007 I have not been actively monitoring it. I am sorry for the spam that got through.

Thus, with a hint of sadness, it is time to close the RopeLover yahoo group.

I would encourage you to keep in touch!  My websites are:

http://PassionAndSoul.com

http://PassionAndSoul.com/author (my books)
http://PassionAndSoul.com/audio (my monthly podcast)
http://BlackBookArt.com (my work as a photographer and painter)

You can also find me online in other formats:

http://twitter.com/passionandsoul

http://www.facebook.com/passionandsoul

http://fetlife.com/passionandsoul

Thank you so much for all your love and support over the years!

Cheers,

Lee (formerly Bridgett) Harrington

I just got off the phone with Nina. Nina Hartley feels like my big sister who I happen to have hot incestuous interactions with from time to time. She’s walked parts of my road for far more years than I have, and yet sometimes her pervy kid brother surprises her with a bit of insight or a mirror to her own journey that it’s pretty darn cool.

She was putting me in my place. I called her stressed out about my inability to help all of the world. That there are some people I just can’t seem to help, that it’s black holes (or in her words, bottomless sewer pipes) of pain, need, anger or frustration. I’ve been brewing with this for the last month or so.

Nina was pretty straight and to the point. Stop it. Set boundaries and limits. Safeword and then get the hell out if your safeword is not respected.

Okay, that last part was my language, not hers.

And then it hit me. I have to put on my own mask before assisting others in putting on their masks.

On airplanes they tell you that you can not put on the masks of others first because you need to be breathing oxygen first before you can help others breathe. In the world of being a lifegaurd, you can’t let someone who is drowning pull you down, becuase then two people are pulled under.

I feel like I am being pulled under. Not in some grandeous please save me sort of way. In that awareness sort of way. There are individuals who I just… well… can’t help. They may think I can, want me to, and splash around in the water screaming “save me.” I swim out, and they grab on to some fault or fear or truth or joy of mine with full force. They begin to grab tighter, as I start to slip under the waves.

I am realizing how hard I am splashing, trying to stay afloat.

The metaphors are getting mixed, and you know what, it’s okay.

What is hard is that I feel a lot of shame about not being able to (a) fix them (b) have the capacity to help everyone who asks me for it (c) needing my own energy to help myself. I feel shame about not knowing how to draw firm limits and boundaries for myself and my capacity. I have shame.

And dear friendly readers, please know that “you shouldn’t be ashamed” does not help. I do feel shame, and should/should not feels like an invalidation of my emotional experience.

So here I am with my shame, trying to put on my own mask.

I am trying to figure out how to discern what I can give. I know this past weekend I overdid it. 4 classes, 1 panel, 1 reading, and demo bottoming for the fantastic Danielle Dv8, and forgetting to eat until Jerry dragged me away to eat pizza. Saturday was the most work I think I have ever done in one day (except maybe when on staff at a Dark Odyssey event) during my career (all the above except 1 class was in one day), and this was only my second conference back on the circuit. I overdid it, and yet I survived. So there is this part of me that screams “but LOOK, you SURVIVED, so you CAN DO IT!”

I hear you desperate screaming self who wants to be a super-hero. I hear you. I hear this part of me and its need to do more, reach more, help more, touch more lives, live more. Voice of the more inside me, I hear you.

I speak back now as the voice of eagle medicine, view over the big picture voice, the one who gets to be in this body for the long run voice. This voice says that if I don’t set boundaries and limits now, I will be drained dry and be a shell of my full SELF. I say now “I deserve to give greatness over the long run, the world deserves me to give greatness over the long run.”

So here I sit, shame self, screaming self, big picture self. We are having a conversation.

Being my own husband is making me stop and pause. Would I push an external husband into the world to be drained in the ways I have been being drained, work as hard as I have been working amidst my health recovery, would I… no. No I would not. I would ask him when he will be slowing down, bringing him a cup of soup on the days it is hard. So why am I so hard on this husband called I AM?

I deserve more than double standards and being latched onto by those that do not mean to drain me so. I can tell they are unaware. I find myself thinking again the questions of “Are You Hungry?” That the way a handful of individuals function operates in my energetic and etheric body as a pump that empties me out so much faster than others do. And this is not their fault. It is how we happen to be compatible with each other. Their fangs drain deeper than others do, based on the density of this thing called ME. They are not bad people…

and neither am I.

I am not a bad person for acknowledging that some individuals, or types of encounters, or specific events, drain me faster than others. And unlike the proposal from another sexuality educator years ago that I should ask for “hazard pay,” I have to instead say no.

So how does someone sitting with shame say no?

I reach for the mask. I stare at it. I try to lift it up to my face.

I try, starting today, to love me and all my needs. Because I deserve to have needs. Beyond my NEEDS.

One of my habits in the world is to put others whom I value on any level before my own needs, wants and desires. NEEDS (such as air, food, water, a place to stay) are often put first, but not always. I have often believed that the NEEDS of others outweigh my lower-level needs. And when someone says to me that they NEED something, my brain has historically made the assumption that that NEED fits in the same category as air, food, water, and a roof over their head. It has only been very recently that I have finally started to break down need and NEED when hearing it from others, as well as discerning my needs compared to my wants/desires.

In my own lexicon:

NEEDS are things we need for core survival.
needs are things we need to be able to function fully.
wants are things that would help me move fully as an individual in the world.
desires are the things that would make me very happy.

When NEEDS, needs, wants and desires come together, I thrive.

I have had times when I thrive, connected fully to myself, deity, and the world. Present in the place of love and being LOVE, embracing my dharma in a huge hug, working in the world as I am called to do, and soaring as I do so. I thrive.

But to thrive I need to discern that I in fact have needs. I know I have NEEDS, but sometimes knowing the needs level has been hard for me. And if it hard for me to see it in myself, it makes sense that I have had challenges discerning between the four in others.Instead, I morph, ever the shapeshifter, into what they need to fulfill all four, because I heard them say they “need me” and what I heard was “what you have I NEED.” They need it for survival. And I can help them survive. And if I can help them survive without killing me, of course I will, I think to myself.

But shapeshifting is hard work. It pushes me into a thousand forms that are me and more, and can leave me disconnected from the core that is I AM. And without I AM fully present, I do not thrive. And if I do not thrive, I do not deliver the best of myself into my own life or the world.

I have joked that I have become an avatar. There is Lee. And then there is Lee Harrington, the avatar, the many-faced mask of teacher/guru/spirit worker/performer. Lee Harrington is projected onto, has dream-walked, has become something that can exist in the world and beyond me. It has become Kermit the Frog that can stand alone without Jim Henson.

This avatar is mistaken for me, for those who project their fears, truths, hopes, desires and processing onto Lee Harrington. I am grateful that Lee Harrington exists for them to examine their fears, truths, hopes, desires and processing with and through. It is important, and I am glad it exists. But when folks want to latch onto Lee and drink when they are craving Lee Harrington… it has left me shameful that Lee Harrington is not all I am.

But I am not on stage. I am human. I am a person who NEEDS to eat, shit, and love.

Nina said I need to work through this shame. She did about twenty years ago, or thought she did at least, until an unintentional vampire came into her world. She bled, bled, and then realized she was bleeding.

I am bleeding. I am thrashing in the waves.

Historically I would have said that I have gills, so I will swim underwater. And I do, and I can, swim in the stress.

But I will not thrive there. I am more than my merman self, though I value my gills so profoundly. It is an amazing skill to have amidst days like Saturday, where I swam, and for moments did in fact thrive in the water.

And yet, the shore calls.

The shore calls.

So I lift up my arms above the waves, and see the eyes, see the eyes.
I sit with the shame.
I cry and acknowledge my capacity.
I breathe deeply.
and I work on it… one day at a time.

Today I start by saying:

I can’t answer every personal email (gods, that SUCKS to say).
I can’t do every event that wants me (I am limiting myself to one big event a month, and one smaller thing, here forward).

There, I said it out loud. And the shame. Oh, my shame self, it’s screaming. The screaming self says “but you COULD if only you tried HARDER.” And the Eagle medicine self… nods, and whispers to himself that some day I will have the courage to narrow it down further.

But not today, and that is okay, and he feels no need to forgive me because he sees how hard I am working.

I kiss my husband on the lips, and curl up for a while.

I go to bed early. Paperwork and emails can wait until tomorrow. I need it.

That does not mean that Jacob Marley was not once a man.

Recently I was told a picture of me could not be me because I am a 32 year old man, and the person in the picture was a woman in her mid twenties. I lovingly pointed out to them that I was transgendered, and that I used to be a female adult performer, but now I was a guy. In response someone else spoke up and said I had never really been a woman, I had always been a guy, just a guy who had stumbled in front of a camera.

The second one hurt more than the first.

I have this piece of art by Brian Andreas hanging in my bedroom

There are many trans people who want to wash away their past, or have it understood that their current identity has always been their truth. They are the gender they have always been, and let any photographs of them be cast aside as a painful reminder of life lived in-authentically. I powerfully understand and appreciate that, having had a partner whose past name being used in reference to him would lead him into an emotional tailspin that often crashed and burned. But that is not my journey… though it does get me thinking about my own.

I have no one who is my Slave at this time, and I still consider myself a Master. That one feels easy. Sir, Master, these feel etched in me. Even when I was a 24/7 Slave myself, people still Ma’am’s or Sir’d me.

Ah, but Ma’am. Am I still a Ma’am? I can respond to it, but no, its not really me right now.  Does that mean that I was a liar, or putting on a mask when my former Girl called me Ma’am? No, I was authentically Ma’am at the time, and proud of it. I was a Mistress, and in that time was fully and truly the Mistress of the men who served me. I was not some dude putting on the skinsuit of a femdom and riding it around for voyeuristic and sadistic thrills. I was authentically me, as I knew me to be at that time.

I have been a female adult film performer, a hot porn clown, a baby butch dyke. Just because my current identity and truths do not encompass those things does not mean I never was. For I feel like I am asked to traverse the land of never was.

But you, you were 7. Now that you are 47, does that mean that you were never 7? Was your 47 year old self peering out from behind watchful eyes, planning and predicting when your true self would bear fruit?

If I embrace my slavery, for I am a Slave, under a public eye- will I have never lived the years in-between my slavery to Masters and my experience with my Matron now? Is the rest a lie, a passing tale, a false truth?

I believe humans are complex beings. That our identities and expressions shift over time. That there are things that were that are not. That there are things that are not that will be. And that there are things that were and will be but are not right now.

Let my center have wheels, moving easily in the slightest of breezes.

Diamond is the female lead of the house, a woman whose service to the world and her tribe is delicious to bear witness to. Many in the kink world would know her as “one of Murphy Blue’s girls,” as he has three incredible women who come with him to events- two who live here at Harmony House. But she is so much more.Powerful, beautiful, hilarious, loving, and mindful of her tribe, her friends, and the conscious construction of a world she wanted to live in. “I knew the shape of the thing that was the void in my life,” she said. “I always waited for them [the science-fiction or fantasy characters] to come and take me away to a land where I fit, and they never did. So I figured I needed to become one of them, and make a place where others could come and be taken away.”

Living at Harmony House, there are 6 adults and 4 children. Dinner is always on the table at 6:30pm, and Friday nights are older kids friendly movie nights. Love abounds, and someone is always there to give directions for friends who call, or to help a kid with a scraped knee or math homework. The walls are decked out with novels and dvds, and laughter abounds.

I am in love with Harmony House.

I told Diamond about my desire to find others for my own tribe, dreams of similar setups of sorts. Of Aiden’s vision of horses and tribe of all ages, of my desire for chickens and space for everyone and yet having shared spaces and so much love. Where love was not about who you were with, but a whole collective and those beyond the walls as well. She smiled, nodded, and understood.

Looking around I feel the heartbeat of Harmony House.

The difference, Diamond says, between her and other poly houses she has met that later exploded, is that that heartbeat was established for years before they made it tribal. That she did not try to form a poly house before she and her first mate were over 30 and already established life tracks. That her mother was a passionate being, and never separated work from life from love.

Between Erosong and Harmony House, I feel like I am starting to not just get, but grok, how to make it work. Some of what it would take. That I am starting to see it form around me, a vision and smoky theory that is cropping up amongst my tribe at large. Seeing friends in Maine slowly take over an island. Feeling the beat of Florida and the altar of love constructed there. Knowing the joy in San Francisco on black leather wings of desire. Because it works, and not just for a few years until it explodes.

Diamond worried that she had just read too much Heinlein.

I think Heinlein looked ahead and read Diamond coming, and wrote about her dreams.