I'm like the sissy St. Teresa

"….be an empty receptacle, with nothing to request, nothing to impose, a simple refuge, not an invader, an infinite and eternal company, discreet, ready to become invisible at the slightest movement of rejection," writes Alejandro Jodorowsky on how to become a good whore. 

Instinctively, this is exactly how I behaved when I was inviting men to my apartment in the early days of my transition, offering myself up for no-strings sex. I made myself available to them without seeking anything in return, not so much as a kiss, a touch, and certainly not an orgasm, nevertheless demanding a twenty dollar bill. I was there for their pleasure entirely and I took my pleasure in giving them pleasure. 

I never asked for a phone call or a phone number. I never asked them to email or text me. I never asked them for a last name or whether the first name they gave me was real. I never asked if they were married or single and never challenged them on whatever they told me of their own volition even when I suspected they were lying.  

When they were leaving, I never asked if I would ever see them again. Some I never did see again. Some I saw multiple times. Some will occasionally write me to this day, seven years later, wondering what I'm doing, looking to see if I'm still free. 

It's not a matter of manipulation or calculation. You must genuinely approach what you do as a slut with an open heart, with no thought of reward other than the reward of a man's pleasure. You must be like a saint, selfless, loving for the sake of love, "as if you were all Virgin Marys," Jodorowsky writes. Oh sure, he's a guy and he's imagining his dream whore. But that's the point, really, isn't it? This path clearly has nothing to do with feminism. You want to become a man's dream-whore, his angel, which will always be an angel he can fuck. 

Why? In this way, being a whore becomes a spiritual discipline, which like any other,  culminates in a release from the imprisonment of one's own needs, one's own ego. It's a release even more profound than the sexual release of orgasm. It is an orgasm of the soul. You become a conduit of pure acceptance, pure desire, pure love, if you will. 

Jodorowsky concludes, "If you give in with love, it is God who will touch the other through you. If you don't give your hands to God, they can't really touch."

I sucked those men's cock with the mouth of God. When they fucked me, it was the pussy of God into which they plunged their cocks. They shook with ecstasy. Their cum was like a prayer pouring spontaneously from their core. How many times did I hear them cry out "Oh God," knowing without being fully aware of what they were saying, of the true holiness of that moment?

My future husband found me and lifted me up out of that sacred whoredom. Or I would still be on my knees today, serving myself to men, any man, every man pierced by the collective arrows of their infinite desire to fuck. The urge in me to do so is still as strong as ever, the need to sacrifice myself every bit as powerful. 

What I gave those men—a brief state of grace, a momentary relief from their cares, their tensions, their burdensome relationships—was little compared to what they gave me in return. The chance to make someone else—if only for an hour or so—happy. They surely didn't see me as a saint, only a slutty cock-craving tranny, but why should I see the world—or myself—diminished through their impoverished eyes?

Why should I—when I can see the world all the clearer, all the more beautiful and magical through my own?  

*     *     *     *     *

Then again, maybe that’s all bullshit. Or just a passing mood. A side effect of my submissive nature, my inherent masochism, my inborn (?) propensity towards self-sacrifice. Or maybe such thinking/feeling is the result of a childhood in which my needs and wants were deemed entirely irrelevant, so irrelevant they weren’t so much left unfulfilled as they were forbidden expression altogether.

No, I can’t believe that entirely either. For giving oneself is a spiritual discipline and does bear a spiritual reward.

The fact is, however, that I am not a saint. Or at least not a full-time saint. I can only slum it now and then in the ghettos of sainthood. Like anyone else, I got tired of being treated like an animal in the zoo. Like a fire hydrant that was always there, ready in an emergency—or ready to be peed upon—and then forgotten. I grew resentful of the inconsideration once the satisfaction had been achieved, outraged at my negation. A fury would build inside me that I shouldn’t allow myself to be treated like a handful of toilet tissue, used and flushed. That I was, after all, a human being, too.

And I never did accept just “any” man. There were plenty I avoided. Ones that wanted me to get into a car with them on a designated street corner in the middle of the night. Ones that proposed we liaison in public restrooms along the turnpike. Ones that sounded weird, off-balance, or downright crazy. I took a lot of chances, played at suicide by fuck—sexicide, if you will—but I can’t honestly say that I gave myself entirely. I’d like to say I did, but I can’t. I’d like to be a saint, but I’m not.

But I do still see men who are lonely, men who exude a certain bittersweet sadness, men who are out of touch, filled with longing and desire, men who haven’t the first clue, it seems, how to approach the satisfaction that eludes them, a satisfaction that seems so fraught with complications, practical and circumstantial, that they might as well be stranded on the moon. These men, and there are many, I would happily sink wordlessly to my knees to satisfy.

Wordlessly is the key word here. For words often make such an act of pure giving—of erotic sainthood—impossible. I don’t mean the shadowless empty words that people often peep at each other like birds in the trees. I mean words like scalpels, words wielded to open up the other, to cut past the exterior, to separate the layers of protective fat and muscle, to lay open the body and reveal the secrets of another.

This kind of intimacy can do real damage to another person if you aren’t ethical and responsible enough to stitch back together the wound you’ve made. And so many people aren’t ethical about this kind of love-surgery. They plunder what they want and leave when they’ve got it, abandoning the other with a gaping wound to heal on their own as best they can.

It’s this kind of interpersonal malpractice that made random, anonymous sex appealing to me; it was a painless way of relating and giving to another. There was a solipsistic intimacy on both sides that was freely acknowledged. There was a pact, unspoken, but a pact understood all the same: touch my surface, but go no deeper. And that was fair enough. And it was true. It acknowledged and respected the essential fact of our separateness. It didn’t threaten that autonomy. Therefore, no one was hurt or ever could be hurt. If words were spoken, they were words like feather, meant to brush and pleasantly over the surface, never to cut or irritate.

Nothing was personal.

With saints, nothing ever is.