Itch

These people are amazing and I think that they really hit the point here
The question (among many others) is: when your sub / dom relationship gets a bit more everyday after few months, how do you initiate your desire to be dominated in any given situation? How do you get exactly the kind of sex you want without directing the scene from the bottom? How do you support your top in hir dominant, abusive role, every time?
These questions get unbelievably tricky in a relationship such as mine and Butch’s, where both can take a dominant or a submissive role. What happens when the desires collide? What happens when one experiences the scene as sexual and another as relaxation or as being about torture with no sexual connotations. To me topping means having total control of another being, and I find receiving feedback during the scene really distracting. However, I read that Butch is more into communicative, gentle and connected scenes, which is equally hot, but few times I’ve followed my urge and gotten her into panicky tears after which we’ve had to stop immediately. Just to give you an example of the difficulties that given differences bring about.
Listening to that podcast made me realise that I’ve stressed about sex a lot lately. The roles, the balance between communication and spontaneity, the needs that cannot be uttered due to shame, inexperience and whatnot. I still want sex, but the pressure has been mounding. The difficulty is that these questions cannot be tackled by simply talking them through, as people communicate so differently and the better people learn to know each other and themselves, the more they fight and settle and love and share non-verbally, through looks, gestures, positions, sighs and touches.

Intellectualising trash

It’s strange that my last post has, according to the reader stats, gathered hundreds of reads, but nobody has commented on anything yet. Yes, it is hell of a long text and maybe the topic is somewhat difficult, but still.

Lazy days with long-time lover. Snuggling, dreaming, endless picnics with half-strangers, writing in a shade of some tree, different every time. Yesterday I gave away books that I’ve grown out of and people were suspicious, almost angry. Are you sure they are free, for real? And most dared take none. Stupid country this is, people sealed and shut away.

Now, some dirty fiction part one, this time in Finnish.

Me olimme sokkeloisessa, betoninhajuisessa kellarissa, jossa oli loputtomasti käytäviä ja pieniä huoneita. Sinä johdatit minua eteenpäin. Vaadit että konttaan perässäsi, mikä oli lähes mahdotonta, sillä ranteissani ja nilkoissani oli kahleet ja pääni ympärillä ketju, joka oli kiinnitetty nänneihini niin että aina kun nostin päätäni, tuntui kuin nännit olisivat irronneet yhdellä nykäyksellä. Sinä kävelit nopeasti ja aina kun jäin jälkeen, humautit minua pitkällä ruoskalla saadaksesi minuun vauhtia. Romahdin jokaisesta iskusta betonista seinää vasten. Olin jo lakannut pelkäämästä tai ennakoimasta mitä seuraavaksi tapahtuisi, keskityin vain täyttämään jokaisen tahdonilmauksesi mahdollisimman nopeasti. En enää miettinyt miltä näytän tai koska kidutus loppuisi, tajuntani oli virittynyt vain yhdelle kanavalle, sinun kanavallesi.
Tulimme uuteen betonihuoneeseen ja sinä olit jäänyt kärsimättömänä odottamaan ovelle. Halusin ryömiä lähellesi, tuntea edes aavistuksen kehosi lämmöstä, mutta tiesin, että käden ulottuvilla oli odotettavissa luultavasti vain kipua, jo tutuksi tullutta tai ihan uudenlaista, mutta kipua kuitenkin. Kun konttasin ohitsesi ovella, et kuitenkaan koskenut minuun sormellakaan ja se tuntui pahimmalta kidutuksen muodolta siihen mennessä, kaipasin niin paljon mitä tahansa kosketusta. Läimäytit oven kiinni perässäsi ja katsoit minua
suoraan silmiin samalla kun puit päällesi isoimman dildon, jonka olin koskaan nähnyt.
Vatsani vääntyi ja silmiini nousi vesi kun katselin sen uurrettua muotoa ja silmiesi
päättäväistä, kovaa ilmettä. Pelko, jonka olin onnistunut häivyttämään jo ensimmäisessä huoneessa, palasi yhtenä ryöppynä ja sai minut kiemurtelemaan kahleissani. Polvieni konttaamisesta syntyneet veriruhjeet huusivat kylmää vettä ja tappi perseessäni painoi sisukseni kasaan, vaikka tiesin, että se oli naurettavan pieni siihen leluun nähden, jota köytit paraikaa lanteillesi. Toivoin sinun puhuvan jotain, mitä tahansa, moittivan minua rimpuilustani tai pilkkaavan minua avuttomasta asennostani, mutta olit piinallisen hiljaa vielä silloinkin kun vedit kertakäyttöiset lateksihansikkaat ensin vasempaan käteesi ja
sitten oikeaan. Silmissäsi oli vaarallisen tyyni katse, josta tiesin, että kaikenlainen
armon anominen vain yllyttäisi sinua satuttamaan enemmän ja kovempaa. Päätin pysyä hiljaa tapahtui mitä hyvänsä, mutta sen päätöksen jouduin perumaan jo seuraavien sekuntien aikana.

Behind the scenes; making of Finnish radical queer activism

Now, here’s some blabbering on Helsinki Prides and queer activism. Last week we witnessed nazi attack on Pride parade and while this has shocked many people, for me it means that more activism is needed, more theorising is vital and that the battle is actually out there and it has only begun.

”GAY SHAME!”, ”LESBIAN RIOT!”, ”QUEER AS FUCK!”.
The Helsinki Pride parade witnessed banners with these slogans in 2007. They marked a shift in Finnish sexual politics and caused a stir both in the parade and among the on-lookers who had come to see the annual Pride march. Approximately 40 people gathered under the aforementioned slogans to march at the end of the celebratory parade that was organised by the local branch of the nation-wide LGBT organisation SETA (abbreviation for seksuaalinen tasavertaisuus) standing for sexual equality. Being the only nation-wide organisation of LGBT people in Finland, SETA has traditionally assumed official role in representing the variety of sexual orientations and gender expressions in local debates.

The Helsinki Pride is an one week event culminating to parade which resembles Pride carnivals organised everywhere in the world. In Finland, Pride events have been organised since the mid-70’s ”liberation days”. Especially in the capital city of Helsinki, Pride parade has established itself as part of the city’s institutional life since 2006. Typically parade spectacles draw positive or neutral attention from the media, political parties and by-passers who function as its audience. Attending the parade is almost constitutive of being recognised as a gay proper in Helsinki scene. Less than fun, more than a responsibility, Pride parade marks group identity and does it by the popular democratic device: the more of us, the better.

It is more challenging a task to find out who organised the controversial Pink Black Block, let alone put together its manifests that spoke against what many gays and lesbians consider their biggest achievements: family rights and social benefits. The manifests called for politics of shame, open conflict and public sex. The tumult that ensued was soon expanded by the Pink Black Block’s avoidance of media and lack of representatives. Few interviews were given under fake names and without pictures. Invisibility was clearly a strategy, but few understood its function. Even many academics on Gender Studies Departments expressed their wish for politically correct manners of communication in order to legitimise the movement as a little more than show put up by a couple of attention seeking teenagers.

The movement brought together both academics and non-academics, but the unspoken consensus emphasised the importance of action rather than theorising. Many involved in the movement argue for the importance of keeping the realms of action and theory separate. My own view, guided by the normativities of Academia, holds that to keep these realms apart leads to unnecessary essentialisation of both. Academia is no more a monastery of few isolated intellectuals torn apart from the realities of practical daily politics. Also, any action is informed by so much of the predominant intellectual trends that building barricades between “theory” and “action” is doomed to fail.

However, I recognise the importance of livability and bodily experience in queer activism. That is, to discuss ”queer” is to discuss individual experiences and intimacies that can be shared up only to a point. Even when personal experiences and intimacies are left unuttered and thus unconceptualised, they form subjects with differences and remain behind any action taken or left untaken.

I will discuss these tensions and the politics of the Pink Black Block further. I will especially concentrate on themes of gay shame, invisibility and violence, as these are cornerstones of new radical queer movements globally. However, I will keep my focus on themes that have raised most attention in the Finnish context. My attempt is to draw a picture of new Finnish radical queer movement by using the Pink Black Block as a reference point, and also meet some of the critique directed towards the movement.

I took part in the Pink Black Block marches both in 2007 and 2008, with emphasis on the latter. I was not involved in the movement as a participating observer, but rather as a queer activist. These biases will show in my analysis. I strongly affiliate with queer theory and action in my life and thus do not attempt to give an objective report. Rather I want to question the possibility of objectivity itself along traditions of feminist anthropology, and strive towards recognising my own biases while still remaining critical about them. It must also be added that when it comes to queer politics, I must necessarily look the issues at hand from the outset, for there is no experimental ”in”. That is, no position of authority cannot be granted or taken. Instead, there are varying and mutually exclusive experiences and positions. This also restricts the vocabulary available to describe the phenomenon. I avoid using the term queer community, for there is no such a thing. The notion of identity is also out of question, for I try to avoid giving an image of queer people as a ”people” of shared concerns and desires. Instead, I use the term ”movement”, which I hope will convey its ever-changing as well as discordant nature.

Many of those who partook in the same events with me will have a totally differing view of what took place and for which reasons. This should be obvious, but unfortunately it is not so in Finland where LGBT people have for a long time tried to assure themselves and others of their shared essence and mutual goals. To think LGBT people as differently constructed individuals with differing privileges and often contradictory goals in the heteronormative, and increasingly in the homonormative, system, is comparatively new in the field of Finnish sexual politics, although not in the ranks of Academia.

Shame as resistance

Gay shame movement emerged in New York in 1998. In the beginning the movement concentrated on organising counter-Pride activities and demonstrations in order to criticise ever-growing commercialisation of Pride parades. Soon Gay shame expanded its scope and began to fight against variety of inequalities built in structures of race, sex, gender, body and class, among others. Gay shame became one of the most widely spread resistance movements of the 1990s and its critique was holistic in a sense that it saw consumer capitalism to be a root cause of social oppression. Gay shame movement combated emerging commercialisation and newly found moral politics of the LGBT people and accused them of selling themselves to market forces in order to gain in benefits and social approval. While this sort of homonormativity, that Lisa Duggan describes as the new alliance between gay organisations and neoliberal values of privatisation and consumerism, has also been a growing concern in the Finnish critical queer movement, sharpest criticism is yet reserved to local homonormative family politics that is seen to strengthen and imitate heterosexual ideal of a middle-class nuclear family.

In its manifests both in 2007 and in 2008 the Pink Black Block condemned the gay civil unions known as gay marriages along with the lesbian baby booms. According to the movement’s manifests, the Civil Union Law and the new emphasis on reproduction confirm heterosexual family norms within society and effectively brush aside the special position of the LGBTQI people in the western societies. That is, protection of and battle for sexual freedom that precedes any freedom in a society. Sexual freedom is seen as an apparatus that enables an all-embracing social change, but future-oriented social change is not queer movements’ goal itself. According to queer critique, the LGBT organisations and bodies that are incorporated into identity politics, strive for wider social recognition and material equality by strategically separating themselves from their former partners in crime; all those who cannot or do not want to conform to binary and exclusory ideal of gender and to organise themselves according to rules of white bourgeois monogamous marriagehood in order to produce biological, strictly gendered offspring.

The two legislative processes mostly associated with the LGBT people in Finland are the civil union law (2002) and the fertility law (2007). Both have stirred emotionally charged debates in media as well as in the parliament. The Pink Black Block and its related groups criticise the state for investing very little to its LGBTQI population, save the legal investments that help to bring population under legislative control. The main disappointment of queer activists is, however, caused by the wider LGBT community, that has promoted and willingly accepted new rights and social benefits as a sign of tolerance and equality. Seen through the queer eyes these signs of tolerance and equality are a part of hug-until-adapt strategy of the authorities, which simply means assimilation of the possible shakers of status quo into the masses until they forget their purpose and conform in order to protect their newly-gained privileges. In 2008 the Pink Black Block put it into words thus: ”We will rob the money, apartments, services and jobs that the society grants for those who are willing to ham it up in the spectacle of heterosexuality”.

The use of shame as a political tool is not, regardless of cynical voices, a mere turn-around act to irritate gay pride celebrators. Here, as in many other instances with the queer politics, we witness a seizure of negatively portrayed aspects of a given group and the process of turning them into a political force. The radical queer movement does not only want to remind celebratory LGBT masses that homosexuality is still a factor that causes shame, stress, discrimination, violence and death around the world, but they effectively want to stick to that shame in order to demonstrate that there is something deeply wrong in a society at large. Lee Edelman has put forward an idea of a society as a symbolic order, of which queer necessarily refrains. According to him, the only goal of the queer is to cut loose from futuristic politics of any kind and ”queer” and disturb ourselves and the social organisation instead. This is done by refusing any identity politics and conventional sense of political contribution and advocating the ”sex” in sexuality in its own right.

Gay shame movement tackles the essentialist notions of a sexual outlaw. The LGBT organisations and flag bearers tend to mobilise identity politics as a means of gaining recognition and political rights. The need to represent a unified whole in front of imaginary heterosexual majority has repressed the awareness of variety of desires and lifes that are disguised in moderate politics or cast away as inappropriate. Thus the mainstream LGBT movements have created their own moral codes and benefit groups in order to create an image of a decent gay (even queer, in Sweden) citizen. The queer action reminds heterosexuals as well as advocates of gay pride that sexual orientation is a construction for the use of identity politics, not something one inherently has. The question is: what are we celebrating in gay parades, if we all embrace variety of desires that are incompatible with our carefully constructed identity categories? To feel pride is, according to this logic, a privileged position of those who have the power to define themselves and be socially recognised according to their definition.

In the process of some celebrating public pride, there are always others that are cast deeper in invisibility and shame. In such political process a subject is constituted through the force of exclusion. To describe the phenomenon of inclusion and exclusion in the field of gender and sexual politics, Judith Butler has adapted the notion of constitutive outside. Those included become recognisable subjects for their own right at the expense and through creating invisible abjects (Butler 1993).

Politics of invisible

Queer as a notion, even if not always in practice, is essentially non-political, although it is used as a political concept. It rejects clear-cut identities, and in the same beat, benefits groups and use of representation. If politics is understood as a strategy of governing masses and solving common concerns, it becomes impossible to define what exactly is queer politics about and is there such a thing at all. However, we can approach the phenomenon from the perspective of bodily resistance. It can never be merely a critique, for it is already here, as a lived reality of other kind. Neither can it only be an alternative way of constructing selfhood within a given society, for it deconstructs the mechanisms and exchanges that work to maintain the stability of gender and sexuality, among other basic building blocks of a given society. Queer as a mode of being certainly resists social norms, but in its resistance there are already apparent new ways of structuring societal relations. It is always more complex set of events than a mere reactive revolt, and therefore it effectively avoids binary trap of otherness, which is produced by a given society in order to ground its own self as a moral principle.

The question then becomes: In what ways is it possible to enact political or other claims for non-identity? The basic question is: who are they? That is, what do people under scrutiny hold common, what are their combined resources and goals, how is the fabric of social relations constituted and maintained among them? In anthropological tradition definition of groups, whether ethnic, cultural or co-habiting, has for long been taken as granted. Only within the last few decades has the notion of identity become to seem suspicious, or at least complex. We still have very few tools to analytically approach a group of people whose only common determinator is a will to actively resist identity politics and its apparatuses, such as benefit group thinking or gathering under the representational umbrella. The messiness of roles and goals of the Pink Black Block people must therefore be seen as the main ingredient and sole purpose of their action, for the outnumbered easy answers given to the aforementioned question gave birth to queer resistance movement in the first place.

The Pink Black Block has chosen to meet these challenges with variety of methods, but the main strategy can be taken to be invisibility or anti-visibility? (to be visible but uncomprehensible). The non-political subject is, of course, the one who does not show its face or let its voice be heard. At the same time this subject, or abject really, is necessarily the most political of all, for it is always others that politics is directed at. Within Europe, and maybe globally, the requirements of absolute transparency and high visibility for the sake of surveillance have come to dominate a public sphere. Against this background it is easy to understand how a small group of people can cause a nation-wide stir by just masking their faces and turning down the opportunities for high visibility and recognisability.

Judith Butler has written extensively on the philosophy of recognition and its significance in a political sphere. According to her, recognition of a social subject always happens within certain frames of recognition. These are regulated by culturally intelligible logic that produces norms of recognisability. The norms of recognisability regulate whom can be recognised as a human subjects, and by default, whom are not, that is, those who remain unrecognised and socially invisible. Thus, according to her, the act of recognising another being is dependent on the socially constructed sense of reality that builds on the logic of sameness. The strength of the Pink Black Block action can partly be explained by the fact that their subjectivity was impossible to recognise within the Finnish social logic of what it means to be gay. The activists’ faces were deliberately masked, which prevented the recognition of their identities in a very basic level, but it also brought forth the uneasy awareness that there are more than just one logic of intelligible political reality. At the same time, the Pink Black Block action during the Pride parades questioned the price of building a collective LGBT subjectivity through compliance to the narrow logic of recognition.

The radical queer movement differs from organisational structures in that it does not strive to expand in number of members or supporters. The emphasis is on personal experience rather than on forming group identity. Only somewhat similar experiences can work together under a same rubric, but the variety can still be, and indeed remains, great. Thus queer cannot be symbolically transformed and politicised for the benefit of ”everybody”. While experiences and motives for action within a queer movement are varied, personification of the queer is avoided within the movement. This was one of the main motives to use masks in the Parades. Through masks it was also demonstrated that regardless of apparent approval of the sexual minorities in a mainstream society, there are many groups and individuals who cannot expose their face in a celebratory, public spectacle of deviance, for social sanctions still apply especially to those who are not white, middle-class, reproductive couples in a possession of citizenship status.
Furthermore, the masks prevented the categorisation of the activists into identity groups and organisatory structures of hierarchy. The representatives of media, however, were eager to identify the Pink Black Block activists in order to personify the action to few ”power-holding” individuals and thus reject its collective nature and minimise its political effect. It was stated, for example, that the Pink Black Block action was solely put together by a couple of youngsters still in a process of self-discovery. This is, of course, a typical strategy of de-politication.

Subversive use of violence

In many instances the debate around the Pink Black Block has focused on its alleged readiness to spread spurts of violence in a society. Moral stances against the use of violence have taken over in discussion about sexual activism in the popular sites of LGBT issues in Finland. This is a paradoxical turn, as part of the Pink Black Block’s proclaimed purpose consists of fighting the violence experienced by queer bodies and practices on the one hand, and revealing the violence built in to the structures of normative exchange of desire on the other.

It comes as no surprise to anyone involved in sexual politics, that non-binarily gendered bodies and people practicing antinormative sex encounter persecution, discrimination and annihilation in all countries. In Finland, the issue of homophobic violence is largely suppressed. One aspect of it is the LGBT community’s willingness to portray gay lifestyle as respectable to the wider public. Also, the mass media has adapted this approach by introducing entertaining and stereotyped gay (men) characters whose only substance as human beings is solely based on their lifestyle as gay people (with actual sex excluded, of course). In Finland, there is also no specially designed services to the LGBT population, such as helplines or campaigns on domestic violence in same-sex relationships. The police has also refused to identify single one hate crime based on victim’s sexual orientation or gender expression in Finland, although hate crimes take place.

These conventions hold on to the idea of the LGBT people being just like everybody else (who exactly is that “everybody” remains a mystery) and have no special needs, threats or strengths as a group. The Pink Black Block was born against this politics of assimilation, noting that many LGBT people have interpreted the lack of recognition as an approval of their identities and sexual practices. According to some Finnish radical queer activists, family-oriented LGBT people have on their part paved the way to moralising and criminalising the subjects and practices that do not follow the heteronormative highway. Marginalising queer desires has led to structural violence in a society. Constitutive outside, in this case antinormative desires, is created by and for the benefit of society and its sole purpose is to hold boundaries of respectable and proper in place. This is done by dividing the societal substance into structural opposites; wholly recognised subjects are constituted through the force of exclusion and abjection of those who do not meet the regulatory standards. Constructing of properly gendered bodies and sexually oriented identities operate along these exclusionary means and in a process, create invisibles.

The radical queer wing largely understands politics of exclusion as structural violence that needs to be recognised and seizured. The knowledge is in many cases embodied and experienced rather than studied and digested, and therefore it is only logical that queer movements more often than not emphasise bodily action over eloquent theorising. This was also the case with the Pink Black Block. In their interpretation, the LGBT people with family and assimilatory inclinations have narrowed down the possibilities of survival in a very concrete sense from those with whom they share a history of common struggle against the naturalised status of heterosexual exchange.

In the 2007 Pride parade the religiously informed anti-gay protestors had set themselves along the march route as they had done also in previous years. Some activists of the Pink Black Block attacked their ”homosexuality is a sin” banners and ripped them down from anti-protestors’ hands. Police quickly moved to prevent a potential clash and some insults were exchanged by both actors before the Block continued forward. The event was missed by most of the Pride paraders as they had already moved ahead, but media got hold of it and boasted conflict during the Pride parade. The local branch of SETA that had organised the march quickly separated itself from the event described by the media as a spur of violence. This occasion clearly illustrates the tensions between moderate and radical wing of LGBT issues in Finland. While hundreds of paraders calmly bypassed the protestors, the Pink Black Block adapted the direct action tactics of extreme left, and saw it as their task to mute the hate speech directed towards the parade. Paradoxically enough, only a handful of the paraders witnessed the actual situation and most of them heard about it through media. In the next year parade anti-protestors were nowhere to be seen.

In 2008 the themes of the Pink Black Block were almost apocalyptic ”HATE”, ”DEATH” and ”TRANSGRESSION”. The manifest spoke against the Finnish state politics of capitalism and control and announced: ”desire is our smart weapon”. In the Facebook event created for the Block it was incited that the participants bring in Molotov’s cocktails (”polttopullot”) to the parade. The web-pages and the manifest were phrased in a mock-hate speech fashion, boasting its participants’ willingness to destroy every instance of heterosexual culture. The local SETA organisators expected the worst and called in the media and the police. After that, the wording of the event was changed so that it now called for burning cunts (”polttopillut”) instead of petrol bombs (”polttopullot”). The Pink Black Block members gave few interviews under fake names in an attempt whose purpose was not to make the Pink Black Block understandable to a wider audience, but to assure the local organisators of the Block’s rightful place in the parade. This hardly soothed the matter and finally the members of the Block contacted the organisators privately to explain that their intention was not to burn gays alive, but rather join them in the parade. The queer tactics of irony, seizure and speaking up were missed both by the local SETA, who titled the Block anti-protestors, and the media.

Violence spread by the Pink Black Block was solely rhetorical and its purpose was to emphasise the violence inflicted by social norms and discriminatory practices on non-conforming people. In applying themes of violence into their action, the Pink Black Block relied on the traditions of extreme leftist movements of the 60’s and early 70’s. Spurred by the Vietnam War, the idea of subversive war was created by the new radical left movements of the Americas, from where it spread around the globe in its diverse applications, and has influenced left thinking until today. When analysing the Pink Black Block’s political models, especially Carlos Marighella’s (1969) work on guerrilla tactics in an urban Brazilian context comes to mind. Within this frame of action, violence plays a key part, but it must be understood as a complex set of interactions between different agents. Violence cannot be conceived as an end itself, nor is it a method. Rather, revolution is the end product and communication the method. The role of violence here is merely to create confrontational positions that enable communication. Violence is glorified in a textual level, it is boasted, and through using the language of violence, positions and differences are articulated. This will lead into a “creative conflict”, a phrasing that activists, among them the Pink Black Block, has repeatedly called for, meaning a societal situation where people have been made to take part in political sphere by bringing opposition and difference into the streets. To mistake rhetoric of violence and its constructive political opportunities for actual bloodbath and bombings can only be interpreted as deliberate act of rejection.

Then again, the shock caused by the tiny group of masked activists in the Pride parades might as well have been sincere. In the Finnish political culture it is common that oppressed groups victimise themselves and seek for sympathy as their strategy of survival. Taking things into own hands, setting up a culture of direct action and using violent counter-talk against its perpetrators, as was done by the Pink Black Block, was a new and threatening act in a Finnish society dominated by skin deep like-mindedness. The sense of threat felt by the local SETA organisers was, and became, tangible in the form of riot police that surrounded the Block during the parades. The Block threatened to violate the image of a homo citizen as a conforming and child rearing consumer. Solidifying this image was, after all, a product of hard work and activism of which decriminalising homosexual acts in 1971 was only a small part of. The agitation felt by many is understandable in this light. The radical queer politics wants to put sex back into ”sexual orientation” when it has become almost a common consensus that homosexuality, just like heterosexuality, has nothing to do with sex, after all. Queer activists also try to act on behalf of solidarity and sharing of resources over family boundaries just when the gays’ and lesbians’ right to be recognised as parents of their children has finally come true. The conflict between these and many other issues is inevitable and it will intensify in the future.
In Finland, the conflict is yet mainly to come, but it should be greeted as a breeze of fresh air, given that in Finland the representation of all non-heterosexual people has traditionally been in the hands of one organisation only with its assimilitionist politics and priorities. Also in Finland it is becoming painfully clear that the interests of all LGBTQI people are always many and often contradictory, and that one party politics is not realistic. The SETA organisation with its many branches and activities has to give up its alleged authority on representing all the LGBTQI matters and take note of the fact that the rubric of gender and sexuality is wider than any bureaucratic or organisational structure can imagine. The LGBT people also need to give up the idea of a shared group identity and come to terms with crucial differences between the privileged positions that different people inhabit.

In 2009 the Pink Black Block did not attend the Pride parade. Many activists had gotten tired of Pink Black Block’s rather inflexible decision-making apparatus where consensus was aspired but rarely reached. Many felt that they had gained strength and tools to realise their personal queer politics. One manifestation of that was the “Queers against Borders” block in the 2009 Pride parade. Queers against Borders criticised the 2009 Pride theme of ”Homo Finland” as nationalistic and exclusory. According to it, gay pride is constructed on false sense of unity at the expense of differences in race, class, citizenship status and legal accessibility among other dividing issues. ”Homo Finland” theme was interpreted by many, including me, to be a reaction to international recession, growing islamophobia and tightening atmosphere around issues of immigration. Queer activists traditionally value trans-national solidarity and freedom of movement, also during the era of European lockdown. Through their own experiences of shame, discrimination and violence, queer activists have internalised that social change does not happen as long as persecuted people go undercover and become persecutors themselves. Thus they stick to shame and hate as their tactics of survival and bring it up in the middle of the celebratory spectacles, such as the Pride parade.

Conclusion

In Finland the Pink Black Block and related queer activism has been criticised of being only a shallow import from the US political field and therefore having no relevance or true weight in the Finnish society and sexual politics. What seems to have been overlooked by these critics is that the Pink Black Block did happen in the Finnish context and it surely spurred active processes of coming together and forming new alliances of action. Also, if one approaches queer as a lens through which it is possible to see world differently, rather than as a strictly defined set of formulations, it becomes clear that queer, with endless adaptations, can offer tools for agency and frames of interpretation not only in the American society, but universally.

Surely, the character of the Finnish queer activism and the Pink Black Block especially is formed along the lines of American queer activism, with gay shame and critique of identity politics at its core. However, this is hardly a corollary of uncritical imitation, but rather an interesting parallelism that is worth further study. I myself am not surprised that this particular form of radical queer movement found foothold in Finland and has remained active even when dispersed. In the country of one dominating LGBT organisation only with an influential history and strong traditional emphases, the people who drop outside of representation or a channel for self-expression are many. The emerging commercialisation of LGBT people and gay men especially intensifies the profiling of LGB people as wealthy supporters of current status quo and effectively marginalises all but a small group of strictly gendered and charmingly conventional corner of the ”queer”. Transgendered people especially are nearly completely missing from this new bulk of make-believe model citizen, among others.

However, the main local reason I see for the new beginning of radical queer politics in Finland is a pronounced standing of family politics in Finnish discussion on LGBTQI issues. The work for gay rights and recognition has been conducted in terms of a child and a right to form an independent nuclear family with equal social benefits. This has led to legislation of civil union law (2002) and the same sex adoption law (2009) in Finland. While the legislative acts have encountered lot of political opposition in a parliament and elsewhere, and thus they have been major breakthroughs when seen from the viewpoint of social rights, they have also created newly established normativities on what is a rightful LGBT person and how the intimacies of that person ought to be structured. In the Finnish welfare system the emphasis on family structure remains strong and often constitutive of personal, legal and economic status through social benefits, rights of inheritance and bureaucracy required concerning intimate relationships. The alternative ways of constructing intimacies and sharing resources are not compatible with the official family schema and remain unrecognised not only in a political level, but also on very practical level, affecting incomes and standards of living.

As it is, the resistance movements, including radical queer movement in Finland, are never first about the ideologies and abstract politics, although academics tend to emphasise this side of the matter. It is true that we need our resistance not to be swiped away and made forget our history that has a lot to say about society at large, but the principal questions here and elsewhere are about legalised and naturalised modes of exchange through which tangible resources are unequally distributed to people.

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Making it by faking it

The day before yesterday she spanked me blue. We were lying in my bed, her arm was under my chin and I was clutching it with both hands while she hit my ass, thighs and soles so hard I couldn’t but whimper. When I complained about the excessive pain in my beaten soles, she went on to hit herself to try the measure of pain. “Either you have really sensitive soles or you’re faking it,” she concluded and hit me harder. “You didn’t do it thirty times in a row on yourself,” I screamed and so she did. I had a hard time not to laugh out loud when she spanked her own soles thirty times while keeping me in place. “Still nothing,” she said and after that I couldn’t but take it. I had a lot of fun, especially when she proceeded to fuck me in the ass. When, in the beginning, it hurt like hell, she quite outright told me to fake pleasure. “You want me to fake that it feels great when it doesn’t?” I screamed and yes, she said yes. So fake I did, and at some point began to enjoy it for real.
I love her strong arms and kind eyes. I love the stubbornness of her neck and the softness of her belly. I love her smile and get ridiculously scared by her threats. She can make me do things and meet my limits by just telling me to, and I love it. We laugh a lot.

During midsummer weekend we drove (she did, as I don’t have a license) more than twelve hours and fucked and talked and walked the rest. On our way there we stopped to fuck in the mosquito-driven woods and I gambled with the road safety by sucking her cock while she drove. “You look like you belong in the woods,” she said and that’s how I felt, too. In the forest I’m calm, alert and in peace. It almost feels very strange to have sex there, as it’s a place of solitude for me, but the trees don’t mind even the roughest kind of love.

It’s the Helsinki Pride week and I have a lot on my mind. Maybe after lunch break.

So, that was one long lunch break. I had time to start and finish reading a novel, to take the dog out three times and to sit on a window sill writing in my paper journal. This is how days come and go. But yes, it’s that time of the year again. Over-emotionality, bad argumentation, heated disputes on people’s facebook walls and, if you are lucky, some reports of an offence and telephone conversations conducted with fake names. Yes, Helsinki Pride seen from where I stand.

Now, if you consider aforementioned cluster of more or less depressing events holy and cultivate a deep-rooted tendency to take all related to it personally, please don’t read forward. My intention, as ought to go without saying, but for some reason never does, is not to hurt anybody’s feelings or attact anyone.

I’ve taken part in many Pride celebrations and parades around Europe, including Stockholm 2001, London 2003, Tallinn 2007 and Helsinki 2008. The first two made me feel stupid, like any caged animal supposed to feel proud and strong in front of thousands of people staring at its body exposed, its inner beauty thrown out for crowds to judge. The third was merely exhausting, as it was too hot and I was there for some vague feeling of responsibility that had to do with supporting our comrades in a situation somehow more vulnerable than our own. It wasn’t until Helsinki pride parade came to have a pink black block in 2007 that I felt somehow poignant again, somehow there and standing for a reason.
What the fuck was the reason behind it, I’ve heard many people ask, and I’ve found myself talking about politics of representation, about the invisibility as a subversive method of belonging, all that. It’s all clear to me, but I’d rather have remained silent, as these things, I believe, cannot be properly conveyed to people who experience their identity very differently, and because these topics are audaciously academic. And since the whole thing does not make any difference apart from the historical point of view anymore (as the movement was torn by inner conflicts between action and theory, with only one or maximum two people fluent in both), so be it.

All I can say is that the regular LGBT community and Pride events particularly leave me cold to the point of hypothermia. Mostly because I have no interest in religion, sports, handicrafts or family planning. Neither do I have much common with LGBT’s who are passionate about these activities. All I care about is arts, politics and sex, and the program offers me none. The next question, of course, is that why don’t I organise something myself and stop complaining. I’m being told that organising events within the Pride framework is easy enough, and I bet it is, at least comparing to the trouble of defending my position as a drop-out. Yet the sweet naivety of these questions puzzles me, as they seem to suppose that only if everybody gave their share in the common order of things, we’d have everybody covered and happy. And everybody who’s not with us, is surely against us? There is no standing outside, no possibility of critique, no politics of resistance. Only by joining us you can question us. Tautology? I think so.

The most beautiful thing anyone ever said to me went like this: You are invaluable in this group even if you are not active, even if you don’t say anything, ever. This was after I had remained silent and passive in one of my art courses for the whole year and apologised the teacher later on. This is what she said. Can you imagine the shock of it, for someone who never put up one’s hand, who never gave up to hateful looks and downright extortion of teachers, who always got downgraded for not being ACTIVE in a predetermined way.

So they want me to contact the Helsinki Pride organisers, put up a workshop, wait for people to appear, blame myself when they don’t, and then feel calm and happy for having done my share. No thanks. People who are into badge printing, binge drinking and ball games, let alone into separate women’s and men’s parties, are not the people who will participate in my activities, and that’s fine. I’m an elitist, I write and discuss for a living, I don’t put up mass events to justify my stance. Deal with it.

In the midst

At this time most people are looking forward to Midsummer holidays. I’m looking forward to sex. Tonight and tomorrow and during mid-summer weekend. I never have a holiday proper. My mind is constantly working on writing, studies and subsistence. Sex, along with writing fiction, is the only way I know of escaping myself and what I consider my work.
I’m about to take off to the woods on weekend with dog and Butch. I think we both need to get off city for a while. I’m tired of compliance and conformity. Let me swim in icy water and walk an endless forest path. Maybe then my body will begin to feel again.

Linkages

A lot of catching up has awaited me here for a while now. Let’s try to tackle it before it gets too overwhelming a task. Sorry for the language, at this time it seems more important to get this blurted out than to proofread grammar.

I had tons of fun last week at Jenny Woo. The NHL promotion party brought a bunch of queer and straight hipsters together and we enjoyed an excellent première gig by the hip-hop playing, all queer ensemble Prinssit. I only drank bubbly and called it a night before I had time to get bored and all angsty about the overall lameness of the straight-run, overly commercial Helsinki scene. On a way home I got to learn about new BDSM queer group in Helsinki and definitely intend to get involved. By all means I should have heard about it way earlier, but as it is, I’ve been a hermit for the past six months and not really aware of what’s going on around me. It’s about disillusionment with queer movement I think, both politically and personally. I’ve grown to dislike people who have most influence in the scene and found ways of political action deeply uninteresting despite my best efforts.

Let’s move on to sex, shall we? Lately I’ve found the unlimited benefits of fist fucking, folks! No dildo can do half as well as my lover’s palm all tucked into my pussy, circling around and making me come five six seven times in a row. Unbelievably forceful spasms, intense eye contact and the sight of Butch’s lower arm tattoos disappearing into my cunt easily make it the best thing this far! My god, a mere thought is almost enough to take me there.

Some complications with Butch. Mostly on my part, surprisingly enough. I make mistakes, leaving her all alone in a worst moment possible, acting selfish at times and not being able to cope with feelings of inadequacy. She wants me to fuck her, to take her, to have her, and I find my experience on being top very limited. The more we spend time together, the more equal our sexual roles evolve, already approaching that typically lesbian “you do me and then I do you” state of mind. However, I’m extremely happy that she poses me a challenge here. Usually I’m always the righteous one, the mature, the one in control, and I hate that role. If Butch can get me adrift, having to tackle things on the run, it is bound to do me good. And yes it feels good.

I’ve begun to fuck her in the ass. Nowadays I’m quite competent to take her largest cock up in my ass, and my goal is to get her there as well. Slowly though, not so much to get her used to the idea, but to prolong her sense of horror just thinking about it. The sad part about experiencing is that one tends to get less and less scared of anything, and being scared is probably one of the most enjoyable aspects of playing with dominance and submission. So I want to keep her there, not knowing what is going to happen, when it is going to happen, and how she is going to cope with that. That sweet anticipation.

In case you wonder why it’s all about Butch, well, we kinda made an agreement that approaches the icky reality of commitment. According to the agreement we regularly fuck only one person in addition to each other. She’s got hers already, me, I’m still looking for someone I could have fun conversations and spend relaxed time with along with sex.

Today it’s my fave queer club at Liberté and I’ll definitely be there with all heart and cunt. Aforementioned Prinssit will play and their drive is gonna get your dyke hair fly about in the wind.

Specially sterilized for you

“That sound of a sterilized package getting ripped open doesn’t sound good to me,” said Butch the other day, a hint of fear in her voice. As it is, I love knives, and what the surgeons’ disposable tools lose in style, they make up in sharpness and hygiene. I wanted to carve something into Butch’s back while she lay on her stomach in my bed, hands tied over her head, clamps attached to her soft flesh every here and there. So I did, drawing out blood into a tissue that still hangs somewhere in the chaos of my flat. Not talking about hygiene anymore.
But it was sweet and I’m really attracted to her back and what it can put up with. I’m too ticklish and slow to heal to really enjoy skin getting broken myself, although that still happens. Scars on my skin remind me that there is no inside and outside really. The line between me and the other, me and the world is transparent. Like any animal, I wound and heal and die.
Today I’m about to venture a sex shop in a quest for an anal plug that holds in place and leaves me free to manage daily tasks while tension builds up in my ass, promising more flexibility and pleasure for later when fucking. Doing the dishes, shopping for food and buying extra book shelves from Ikea, all get an extra flash of perverse glamour when being tapped into an anal plug, preferably vibrating one. Don’t believe me, try out yourself.

Ground

I had muchos fun yesterday with Butch and her offspring at the local playground. Ball pools, bouncy castles and trampolines did the trick and I felt like a child I never was again. Everybody should squeeze themselves into a tiny mushroom house just to feel ones bodily proportions in a different dimension at least once a month. Very relaxing, except for the fact that Butch was stuffed into the same mushroom house with me and suddenly I was panicking. The sheer family feel to it. The make believe togetherness that all the families in the world are forced to play out in their tiny shelters spread over indifferent landscapes. I got out pretty fast, needing to hold on to my boundaries and sense of self.
Sex I can have without any regrets, but emotional closeness signals danger to me. With Butch I definitely sense that danger, against all odds. We are so differently built that I could easily vanish into my own reality without any trace. She is nowhere near me when it comes to visions, sensations or dreams. But there is something about her that attracts me, and it may have to do with her being solid, sustainable and steady. I’m done with neurotic, crazy wrecks of human beings, the traumatic, narcissistic and abusive creations of contemporary family life, the unsecure, imitative and emotionally distant deviants who for the most part are compressions of anger, avoidance and abandonment. So I figure that right now I love Butch for her honest emotions, reasonable behaviour and an ability to keep feet on the ground, even when playing.

at l(e)ast

It’s been endless sex with Butch lately. Today I took a day off and decided to stay home, although there were goodies a-plenty on offer. Not an easy decision, mind you.
Yesterday I licked her off twice and fucked her until we were both numb and our backs running with sweat. I love the way she goes all sobby and vulnerable underneath me, pleading and talking soft when I fuck her, not a trace of rage and force that she uses to keep me constrained when she’s on top left. Generally I enjoy bottoming more, but slowly I’m getting the idea of having sex as a top as well. A sadist I can turn myself into easily, but having intimate, passionate sex as the one who does the job is relatively new to me. What I’ve read, most masochists turn into sadists at some point, at least temporarily, along their career. I suppose the same goes with topping. It has to do with a sense of power that getting someone out of control brings, for me at least.
As it is, Butch and I are not playing with much s/m anymore. I did introduce her to my spiky wheel, though, which plays a part in my passion for sharp and edgy metal ware. The scene got surprisingly verbal after I carved a word ROMA on her back with it, again and again, until she’d figure out its meaning. Sweet jesus it took her long and her back was bleeding nicely as a result. I cannot believe that some people actually do not read words backwards in their mind! I figure that butch does from now on, thanks to my sweet pastry wheel.
Other than that, I still gotta find someone to spank me good, I suppose. What a trouble, and what fun. If only I had a moment of time to spare. Maybe next week, or one after that. Summer is too short a time to have all the fun one is supposed to have during it, and only then.

Besides

Too hot to fuck. Not that I’d have time anyway. (Obviously not true. There is always time to fuck.)
Instead, I have a crush. A barely noticeable, not-going-to-happen kind of crush. Let’s call hir z, as everybody in this nightmarish lesbian village is bound to find out everything in a blink of an eye anyway.
Again I have a restless feeling of needing something else, something completely new altogether. It doesn’t even have to do with sex, at least not solely. I feel lonely and not being able to communicate myself to anyone despite bunch of close friends and some amazing lovers. I’m never been sexually into silent and complex type, but lately my thoughts have been on z, whom I suspect might understand me and share something intimate in some non-verbal, withdrawn universe.
Of course, all this has to do with stress and needing time for myself, missing my art and my books and my cheerful solitude. It may also have something to do with spending a lot of time with Butch, whose straight-forward, often rather insensitive mode of being makes me withdraw emotionally (although lighten up sexually!). But then why is it that Queer Girl, who understands me perfectly and is beyond sympathetic and loving in every respect, leaves me just as intact?
Don’t have answers. It is strange how all the people in the world sometimes seem completely wrong for me, no matter how much I love them for what they are.