Whatever mutations social media undergoes in my lifetime, I will always associate it with porn.

Let’s start at the beginning. From 2007 to 2011, I was an independent contractor in a Bay Area BDSM house; imagine a kinky version of Miss Mona’s in the Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. For me — a scruffy young punk with a very dirty mind — it was kind of like a femme finishing school.

My fellow pro-dommes (and pro-subs, and pro-switches) inspired in me a newfound gusto for all the things I had never liked about being a girl during my adolescence. And while I’ll admit that the context of performance and the reward of cold hard cash were my first motivations in constructing a feminine persona of grace and charm, I eventually amplified my sexual id through the gleaming sound system of this new persona.

I called her Tina Horn (after fictional teenage temptress Audrey Horn of Twin Peaks, and soul survivor Tina Turner). Sex work permitted me to invent a fantasy character I could embody, and it was thrilling. I became well known for my intelligence and my healthy ass, and I was very successful.

The house had a simple website, and some presence on an online forum for sex work. With a couple of fetish gear pictures and a few hundred seductive words, I advertised time with Tina Horn to the world. I emailed with a few of my clients to arrange appointments, but mostly we booked over the phone.

It never would have occurred to me in a million years to give Tina Horn a Facebook page, or even to keep a blog. Rather, I created an ironclad persona that dematerialized and rematerialized at the discretion of my clients. This was part of the sustainability of this work. Intimacy with the Real Me was not on the menu.

Including fallibility. Many tools of the sex trade that I learned in that house have stuck with me for life. One that really stands out? “Mistresses don’t get sick.”

The house had a rule. If your coworker was ill, and you had to cancel her appointments for her, you never told her client the true reason. We made excuses: the house had accidentally double booked her, or, “We’re so sorry, but unfortunately she has unexpected, important business to attend to.”

Our boss had decided — around the time she started the house in the mid-nineties — that it was important to maintain the mystique of the Mistresses. Our clients didn’t need to know we were fallible. (Or that we were grossly snotty.)

Let’s Dismantle The False Dichotomy Between Porn And Erotica

This made complete emotional sense to me. Tina Horn did not exist outside of the walls of the house. I was safe to explore dangerous zones because it all happened within a very structured and heavily boundary-ed system.

The original “Tina Horn” was like a robot. You put a coin in her slot, so to speak, and she powered up to perform a custom dance for you. She was clever, she was naked, and she tied you up. You could spank her and she would squeal with delight. She would totally kiss other robots. She cared about your problems and she had a penetrating gaze that looked deep into your soul. When you left the house satisfied and several pounds lighter, Tina Horn powered down. Which meant that I could eat a sandwich, giggle with the other girls, count my money, do my paperwork, change into my bike shorts, and leave the house.

I animated Tina Horn, but I was not Tina Horn.

After a few years of working in this house, I started performing in porn. Filmmakers such as Shine Louise Houston and Madison Young hired me for video projects just like my clients had hired me for private BDSM services. I kept the name Tina Horn. But the way I related to Shine and Madison was not the way I related to my clients — the camera was now the proxy for the client.

One of the defining characteristics of the queer porn genre is the behind-the-scenes performer interviews. The directors who were hiring me expected me to answer tons of questions about my personal sexuality on camera. In fact, it often felt that those documentary interviews about gender, desire, identity, and community were as much, if not more, the actual point of the films, rather than the hardcore sex.

This was around 2010, and people were starting to get really serious about Twitter. I thought Twitter was fucking stupid. It felt like a short-form promotional tool that I didn’t think I needed.

Please remind me to put “hermetically sealed humiliating seduction revenge scenes” on my list of services #JessicaJones

???@tinahornsass

It seemed “social” in the worst kind of way — a distillation of fair weather friendships designed as a vehicle for narcissism. Then some porn friends tricked me into joining it by creating an account for my ass. They shared the password with one another. The first tweets of @TinaHornsAss were collective jokes. My friends knew I would use the tool once there was an ironic distance.

I animated Tina Horn, but I was not Tina Horn.
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How could anything I said ever be truly serious, when it was couched within the raunchy concept of tweets emerging from my butt hole? And they were right. Eventually, I took over the account and started tweeting in earnest. Now that I understand the essential role that Twitter plays in being a public figure — now that I’m a journalist, writer, media-maker, and modern prankster — @TinaHornsAss is still the account I use.

And the irony remains that even after almost five years, Twitter and I still don’t really jive. It still feels like an unpaid obligation. I can’t ever seem to find my voice. I struggle to balance ethics and mediate my own love of attention. I agonize over 140 characters: concision is not exactly my forte.

Digital communication has always seemed like the opposite of sex to me. In a room, I feed off the sexual energy of another person. Without that nervous system interaction, I grow exhausted and burn out quickly. Twitter makes me feel that way, too. It doesn’t give me anything I want. Sometimes my followers and I interact, but at this moment I have 7,781 followers, and I interact with maybe 50 of them — mostly colleagues — and occasionally fans. Unlike a client in the BDSM house, I can’t look them up and down and read them. I don’t know how to be Tina Horn to them.

Like sometimes you gotta drink that much whiskey and wear that much leather and frown that hard to be a fucking woman in this world

???@tinahornsass

In Program or Be Programmed, Douglas Rushkov reminds us that the point of all Internet activity is to be social. In my concept of her, Tina Horn doesn’t socialize. Or rather, she does in controlled environments. When I socialize with another queer porn performer, I do so as The Real Me. But when @TinaHornsAss talks to, say, @AndreShakti, we are interacting with the knowledge that our fans can voyeur, and that this interaction is good for business. But that doesn’t give me the social satisfaction of human connection — it makes me feel like I’m putting on a promotional show. I’ve yet to be convinced that this is good for business, or that it’s meant to satisfy anything other than my ego.

But I learned to use Twitter. I learned to give out the information I wanted people to know. I basically tweeted any time I felt “on” as Tina Horn — when I was shooting a scene, or attending an event “as” Tina.

An artist friend teased me that I only tweeted when I was in public at porn events. I looked at her and blinked. “That’s the only time Tina Horn exists!”

Nobody else seemed to think this was reasonable. They were tweeting their impulses, their dark emotions, their vitriol, when they were going to sleep. The closest intimacy I felt comfortable sharing was how I liked my coffee.

But Twitter wanted more from me. Twitter wanted to know as soon I was set up at my desk in the morning. It wanted to know what I was eating. It wanted my funny observations, my insight. It wanted quotes from what I was reading. It definitely wanted my vacations.

Digital communication has always seemed like the opposite of sex to me.
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Everything became potential fodder to contribute to the public character development of Tina Horn. I felt I wasn’t permitted to be The Real Me — even during my most cherished private moments, like while reading a book or masturbating or working out. Those un-Tina Horn moments needed to contribute to the Tina Horn brand, to keep me relevant, to keep people wanting to work with me and hire me.

 

I tried to teach myself to get pleasure from it. Like the occasional dopamine rush of seeing my work retweeted by someone I admire. Once I posted a dream I had about Samuel Delaney, and he responded with a story about Tim Curry. That felt magical, like a real connection with a distant icon.

Trying to find pleasure in social media kind of felt like trying to develop a taste for cigarettes even though they made me nauseous. As we all know, cigarettes make you cool and help you relate to others. And some people really take to them. But there’s probably a reason they make me nauseous. I’m not built for cigarettes, and I’m not suited to Twitter, and I don’t really understand why I should condition myself to need something that feels bad for me.

I am aware that my aversion may simply be a defense mechanism. It is possible that I have convinced myself that if Tina Horn doesn’t have an inner life, I am protected from the horrible things society tells me will happen to me because I’m a whore. That my father will be disappointed in me, that I will be shut out of the jobs I want, that I will lose my ability to have intimate orgasms, that I was just doing it for the attention.

literallyme

???@tinahornsass

On one hand, I’ll admit that it’s incredible for people who enjoy my sex performance to see what I have to say — about sex, or coffee, or music, or an article. But on the other, sometimes I get the impression that people feel entitled to it because of what I am — which is a whore — and what I do‚ which is making money by working hard at the words and sex I love. I feel as if the world expects me to outsource my imagination, and every ounce of my gut screams at me to stop. After all, my imagination is my livelihood.

And yet I tweet on, because I still believe in the potential, and because I am afraid of becoming obsolete. But I long for the time when I was allowed my simple private moments; when I could count my $20 bills, put on my street clothes, and just go home.

Happy New Year. Happy first walk around whatever body of water is closest to you, first meditation, book read, friend hugged—happy first everything. I know as well as you do that time occupies an elastic-ly arbitrary shape in the world, but I am not about to deny myself the deeply satisfying reward of closing up one year and beginning a fresh one. And if you’ve got similar neurosis around organization, I empower you to do the same.

“Ooooh, I’m being empowered!” P—my partner—always jokes when I say this. “Thank you for empowering me!”

Still, it’s challenging, isn’t it? The way we come face-to-face with the things we’d like to leave in the last calendar year, the things we expect ourselves to be able to cleanly cut away from just because we scrawled that we would in 2019?

For me, this has been apparent in the savagely unpredictable landscape that grief occupies. It’s truly a wild ride. Even as a person who has experienced a good deal of loss in my life, I find myself caught in the Mariana Trench of it: darkness that abounds and about which we know nothing.

This month, I lost both of my grandmothers. In the same week. I also lost a friend. The details of my friend’s death are still being sorted through, so I won’t publicly talk about them, but I will talk to you a little about my grandmothers.

For those of you who have read my work at The Establishment, you know that I lost my parents at a young age. I was adopted by my maternal aunt, and raised by her, her husband, and my maternal grandparents. We all lived in the same trailer park. My stepdad’s family—the man who had still been married to my mother when she died—I have also stayed close with, including and especially his mother.

My grandmothers were of the Silent Generation, though that is the only thing they had in common: the way their movements were informed by a kind of careful attentiveness and disgust with waste that only economic scarcity can instill. My maternal grandmother, Donleita, was a diva who loved leopard print, fanfare, and Jesus. My step-grandmother, Marjorie, was a dressmaker who out-earned her husband (but never talked about it), couldn’t cook to save her life, and had grown up on a farm in rural Oregon where they kept things cold in a hole dug in the dirt. Her father drove Greyhound buses. Her brothers helped load pianos off ships coming from South America. Both women taught me grace, the love of a good cup of coffee, how to sew, how to use lipstick as rouge, and how to survive in a world full of callousness.

I feel strange around my friends—bone-tired, unable to make small talk, monitor my intonation appropriately, or respond quickly enough to jokes. As I walk them to the door, I know that our visit was not one that included me at my best. That I took too long in moments when I needed to be faster, or was too swift in moments that required reflection.

If you’ve been witness to that, it’s not you, it’s deeply me. Please be patient. Please keep being kind. I am hopeful that it will pass quickly, and I also know that healing takes whatever time it needs, no matter what boundaries I try to enforce upon it.

P and I have an annual tradition that we are unable to make happen this year due to the events that unfolded in December: in January, we go someplace hot. We leave behind the wet, gray sog of the Bay Area in January, trading it in for Joan Didion on the beach in the Yucatan, or a cooking class in Bangkok. We save all year so we can circumnavigate not only the drear of post-holiday come-down, but also so that I, specifically, can hide from ghosts; nearly all of my major death anniversaries occur in January. This is some kind of mercy or some kind of sadism, I haven’t quite decided. The slew of deaths last year, however, happened in December, and the funerals themselves are in January.

As such, we’re home. Wearing forty layers of clothing in our 19th century house that leaks hot air (original windows are beautiful, original windows are beautiful, original windows are beautiful).

Still, we managed to go to Los Angeles for two brief days this last weekend, to meet family for a short trip that brought some levity and kindness to the month. P, always the adventurer, took us to the Marciano Arts Foundation to be blown away by art—Ai Weiwei’s ballooning sculptures of bamboo and silk, namely, that intersect ideas of ancient legend, kite-making, and the refugee crisis. While wandering through the huge, brutalist modernist halls of the Marciano, we encountered work by Bunny Rogers, the 27-year-old who’s making waves in the art community with her work around Columbine.

The piece of hers that we saw was immersive; you are invited to walk into two rooms that are full of falling snow made of paper. Projected on the wall is an animated video of a girl playing piano on a stage. The description of the piece said the following:

Rogers relies on corrupted memories to piece together a narrative that both mourns its origins and begs for resolution. Her videos, A Very Special Holiday Performance in Columbine Auditorium (2017) and Mandy’s Piano Solo in Columbine Cafeteria (2016) depict rehearsals of ceremonies for mourning.

My mind went wild at this concept of corrupted memory—what is that, I wondered from my required two-foot distance. A security guard eyed me, looking wary.

In Rogers’ case, it seems to be about the intersection between mourning (a public/private thing) and popular culture/media/cartoon. After all, the reason the pieces are so resonant is because the animated videos reek of after-school-special, and yet are heavy-hitting in their emotional resonance: Columbine. Columbine is a beautiful, pansy-like flower that needs special care, yet the first Google search of its name produces articles upon articles about the school shooting. You need to clarify—”Columbine flower”—in order to get results for the thing that came far before 1999.

I know that both collective and personal grief become totemized. I know that we tend to take the fractured pieces of our grief and try to hold them up to everything and everyone to see where they fit — to the sky, to see how or if the light shines through. To the face of another, to see if they match the color of their pupils. To the work we do in the world, to see how our own mortality serves us—if we’re doing this living thing right, or paying appropriate homage to those who have gone.

The reason the idea of corrupted memory is so fascinating to me—and potentially a new lens for looking at the way public and private intersect—is because of the way it relates to the identities of marginalized people. I thought, for example, immediately of Elizabeth Marston saying that femme identity is “an unauthorized copy of femininity.” Disallowed.

The fact of the matter, too, is that public and private lines are even more blurred than they once were; social media knows when I’ve been talking to my friends about menstruation, or celery juice cleanses, or that I’m sad my niece and nephew are growing older. I regularly spill my guts on Twitter, unconcerned with being too much. I write thinkpieces, for heaven’s sake. And while I do believe that visible vulnerability is an evolved strength, I also believe it’s because my concept of myself and the internet have both become less defined as opposite of one another—and in that sense, they’ve corrupted.

We position ourselves as opposites of the virtual world, and that is important, somehow, to maintaining autonomy from the internet. But as free media begins to look more and more like personal narratives (which are nothing new — personal journalism really took off in the seventies, thank you Queen Joan Didion), our information becomes, as Bunny Rogers gestures to, pixelated.

I know that both collective and personal grief become totemized.
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What does it look like for us to embrace this corruption, at least in times of grief? To allow the soft, shape-shifting of these entities to create for us a kind of collective consciousness that we can pull from in order to enhance our experiences of feeling?  

The fact of the matter is that we need more complicated ways of thinking about our reactions, responses, and selves as individuals—and especially how we as individuals become parts of a whole (community/family/nation). We readily offer that kind of generosity of mindfulness to art, but we rarely do that for ourselves.

Perhaps I should think of myself as an exhibit more frequently—one that depicts provocatively and image-istically, and has a juxtaposed title.

Say, Self Inside Self Inside the Tomb of Marie Laveau

Woman in Flannel, Head in Hands, Stonewall Inn

A Portrait of a Dinner Party at Pearl Harbor

How would you title you?