Devon Hunter

Michael Jackson died today, and I am completely bereft. I have spent the last several hours crying until my eyes are sore and raw, and I don’t care if anyone thinks it ridiculous or silly. He is one of my heroes, and it has not been easy watching him die slowly for the last 15 years. I expected him to die early, because that type of furious fire always burns itself out quickly… but 50? I thought he’d puff out at 60.

I don’t believe any of the slander. I never did. I know that he was a kind, fragile, and beautiful person who, despite what must have been incredible tenacity, was not strong enough to support the weight of his own talent, legend, fame, and wealth. I do believe that he survived (what in time will be revealed to be) incredible abuse at the hands of his father and early producers at Motown. I also believe that if there is any truth whatsoever to the slander against him, that it is a thorny seed planted in him as a child, which then grew into a terrible flower. But I don’t believe any of the slander.

Michael invented and developed the vocabulary of pop music culture for the entire world from the 1970′s until now, with everything in pop music, dance, and video being either an imitation or variation of his invention, or a total rejection of it (which is still a response to it). His presence, even in a two dimensional reduction of the man himself, was captivating. He took all the influences of his youth, mixed them up with his own vision, and put out some of the most strikingly brilliant material the world has ever seen.

Michael was a philanthropist. He was a visionary. He was an artist.

And even though I never met him or knew him, I feel that I have lost one of my best friends. His soul was too big for one body. His genius was too intense for one mind. In building bridges across race, gender, and class, he destroyed the connection between himself and the external world. Like any number of other creative whirlwinds (en français on les appèlle”les monstres sacrés”), he spun out of control trying to find the calm at his own center. Michael Jackson, as a dancer and entertainer (along with Janet), is the reason I became an artist and scholar.

There is no one to replace him. I can’t believe that body is now still forever. I love you Michael. Good bye.

I am about to write this blog with the full knowledge that it could set off a series of conflicts later. I also want to preface what I’m about to say by admitting that I am in no way perfect in regards to safe sex. In fact, I’m not very good at being consistent with practicing it. I know the risks, I know the consequences, but (like a huge number of people) I have not completely embraced 100% safe sex (and I don’t believe other people when they say they have: I’ve hooked up with far too many people who claimed 100% and then fell short with me for me to buy into all their nonsense).

All of this stems from the following: 1) Most of the condoms I’ve tried have either desensitized me or hurt me (however, Pleasure Plus are almost awesome and Lifestyles SKYN are passable), 2) Condoms have been served to me (and the rest of the U.S.A.) with a hefty dose of guilt and fear, instead of eroticism and empathy, and 3) Gay + Artist + Middle Class + America = worthless (if I’m not rich, straight, and corporate then I don’t have any real value in this country anyway, right? Imagine the potential extra layers of burdensome self-loathing for people who are poor and/or non-White).

But I recognize that this is not good! I recognize that this needs an adjustment in behavior on my part. I own that I am making bad choices when I opt for natural, rather than safer, sex. I know I am valuable and deserve better, that I should be respecting my partners. I know this. It is one of the reasons I am so intent on helping with promoting the safer sex strategies Dr. Terry Gerace wants to implement on his website. It’s because I truly want to acclamate to taking better care of myself, my partners, and my community/world. I feel bad that I’m not there yet. But I definitely never advocate barebacking.

So, after acknowledging that I need to practice safe sex with better than 50% regularity, I am going to go out on a limb here and call Mason Wyler out as the single most irresponsible person I can think of in adult entertainment. I saw that he was wanting writers for his site/blog, and I submitted my name before I read his content. All I knew of him was that he is a bottom with a reputation for being a gutter slut. However, I’d not actually read his own words before…

Utterly irresponsible… It is bad enough that gay porn is reinforcing the notion for gay men that bareback sex is “better,” but the outright smut from Mason’s own pen breaks my heart a little for him. In his entry “I want Brock Armstrong” Mason Wyler writes that Armstrong is hot specifically because he does bareback sex videos. He then defends this outrageous statement by saying, “That’s right, I said it!” beaming with pride, as if he has liberated himself and his readers from the cold, dark abyss that is safe sex. BULLSHIT!

I’m sorry, but at what point do we start holding people accountable for the net they cast? Yes, everyone is free to make choices in their lives, but at what point does your personal life start affecting everyone else too? Thomas Jefferson said that one man’s rights end where the next man’s begin… okay… so… The porn industry works with people who, in their personal lives, make the choice to practice bareback sex. Fine. However, once the industry becomes saturated with this imagery/attitude, and once the public begins responding by imitating this behavior more and more (and then STD infections explode again), isn’t the industry responsible on some level? Yes, there is still a freedom of choice innate to the consumer, but underneath it all, wasn’t that free choice heavily weighted towards the self-destructive?

Tobacco companies are being held responsible for addicting people to their product and for the health consequences of the general public. Don’t be surprised when the same becomes true for restaurants that offer fat/salt/sugar-laden food. These foods are addictive. Don’t fool yourself – these chains train their customers to want only bad food, to the exclusion of more healthful options. There’s a push to hold these purveyors of toxic food responsible for the product they make. So then, why not adult entertainment too?

I offer this question for debate: Is a person who takes Mason’s opinion into himself, practices the same behavior as his dysfunctional role model (with Mason’s example specifically in his mind), and is consequently infected with a disease, not in a position to hold (himself and) Mason Wyler responsible?

If we as a culture could be gobsmacked by 0.03 seconds of Janet’s titty (which is so completely ridiculous on so many levels that I’m not even going to entertain addressing them), then why aren’t we outraged by Mason Wyler’s wholly chaotic attitude towards safe sex in the midst of a resurgence of HIV infections? I believe that people imitate what they see, and I don’t think it’s fair that gay men seem to see only bad examples. Where are the portrayals of healthy, compassionate, generous same-sex interactions?

The question has come up (not worded exactly this way, but pretty close), “How did you maintain a balance between staying small and getting bigger?” In other words, how do anorexia and Dysmorphia co-exist? Well, to be frank, they don’t balance, and they don’t co-exist. It’s like being pulled apart – I would actually feel that kind of shearing force in my brain. It was horrible, and looking back I don’t know why I held onto that turmoil so long.

Ups and Downs

Constant fretting was a part of my life because of these two situations both vying for my attention. I desparately wanted to put on lean muscle, but every time I inched up even two-tenths of a pound on my digital scale, I would figure out which meals I could skip “to make up for it.” It doesn’t make any sense. I knew it didn’t, even when I was in the middle of that terrible dichotomy. I wanted the look of muscle without the numerical “score” of my weight going up (I suppose it’s a game, like Hearts, where the fewer points you have, the better?). At any rate, it was a dizzying, confusing, and frustrating teetering act.

And it had other repercussions, other than my body composition. I am already prone to mood swings; however, when you do not eat properly your body systems get out of kilter. All of them. Including your hormones. One hormone in particular, serotonin, is in your gut. This hormone affects mood. If you do not eat properly this hormone gets out of balance, and then your moods get out of balance too. So, my eating disorder also escalated my emotional stress. I’ve been blessed to never have had any major injuries – I can presume only that taking vitamins protected me from difficiency disorders, because my teeth, bones, hair, skin, connective tissues, and all other systems seem fine to this day. If I’d not been at least taking vitamins, I could very well be falling apart already. That happened to my friend Cheryl. She was anorexic for 18 years, never took supplements, and now her teeth, bones, and joints are a wreck.

Janet Jackson + Chris Evans = hot mess

One day I was looking in the mirror for the 497th time that day, and a flash of insight caught me off guard: I was trying to blend two people, whom I looked nothing like, together into one body. Although it hurts my feelings a little when people remind me of this, I am not, in fact, a beautiful Black woman. Also, although I am a White man, I do not look anything like Chris Evans. I don’t understand exactly what amalgamation I was trying for, but recreating myself as a collage of these two was definitely not working well. I look back on this moment, and I realize that it was the instance where I almost pulled myself out of this vortex by myself. But something happened immediately afterwards that distracted me from this little thunder bolt of logic…

Stupid boy

I was with the only guy I had a long term relationship with during college. He was a pudgy little dude with crazy brown hair, and I thought he was absolutely marvelous. When he poked my belly and said, “Getting a little soft around the center, huh?” I took him seriously. It didn’t occur to me that he was being facetious. Over the next few weeks I dropped from 120 pounds to 110. I started passing out in dance class. It was scary. The pic of me that I just posted where I weighed 125 pounds is bad enough – at my worst I weighed 15 pounds less than in that picture. You could see my spine and hip bones. And I thought I was staggeringly beautiful (for a few moments each day between long bouts of self-loathing).

Whether it’s his “fault” for upsetting me, or my “fault” for being so sensitive, or no one’s “fault” at all, that “soft around the center” comment was the driving force behind my eating habits for the next eight years. The effect of the comment lasted years longer than the relationship with Shane.

Emotional instability and therapy

One of the long-term side effects of this “balance” between being small and getting big is that my moods shift very easily and quickly. I feed off the moods of others without realizing it, until after the change has already happened. Also, if I get hungry, I get mean. If I’m ever randomly rude to you just say, “Bitch, do you need a doughnut?” I probably do need to eat something, but a doughnut won’t be my first choice (although the humor will make me smile). My rages would get out of control particularly when I felt people were being mean to me without provocation.

I finally went to a therapist while I was at UCLA. I went because of an incident during my African drumming class. One of the other students (who never attended class, and didn’t know the rhythms) told me I was defiling the drums with my “White hands,” and proceded to push me away from the instrument while grabbing for the mallet in my hand. Well, I was already feeling angry about something else. She tipped me over the edge, and I vented all over her in front of about 100 drummers and dancers. It didn’t help that she was Black, and that everyone knew I was from South Carolina. It immediately became a race issue to them without me ever intending it. They didn’t know what I was already contending with, so on the outside, without any insight into me, I understand why they would assume that. It hurt my feelings they would jump to that conclusion, but it does make sense. I was forced to enter “anger management” classes.

I’m glad. It gave me the opportunity to finally address some of my demons. From that point forward I started improving. But it still took a few years after I completed that therapy to finally let go of my desire to have Janet’s waist and Chris’s chest.

“Better” days

Everything started improving consistently and quickly after I left my last boyfriend in October, 2006. You want to know what finally forced me to let go of alot of my obsessive compulsions? Exhaustion. Pure and simple. I’d been working seven part time jobs to support myself and Scott. When I found out he’d cheated on me with about 30 people while I was out working day and night, and that he was opening credit cards in my name (as well as hiding the bills, maxing them out, and then not making payments), I finally had to work so much that there simply wasn’t time to worry about what I looked like. It didn’t matter if I made the bed or washed the dishes. It didn’t matter if my books were alphabetized by subject/author/title. Suddenly avoiding bankruptcy mattered a whole lot more.

During the months after I left Scott I simply got out of the habit of worrying about my appearance so much. I had a whole new catastrophe to work on (and on a dark level the martyr in me loved the torture). Nearing two-and-a-half years later, I’ve become completely financially independent again, with my credit score being even better than before Scott’s interference. And ironically my eating disorder gave way to fiscal survival. It seems that all I needed was a crisis severe enough to completely distract me from calories.

So, the eating disorder is gone. Done. Good riddance. There are still some traces of the Dysmorphia, in that I can’t see how I’m shaped when I look at myself in a mirror. I see only a flat shape with muddled undulations on the surface. Only in pictures, which are removed from the same space-time as my viewing of myself, can I see me. I need the removal of “now.” By looking back a few moments into the past at how I looked then, I see my curves and proporations. But even then I still don’t trust that 10 seconds later the same holds true. This is getting better as I (slowly) mature.

I look forward to the day, not when my see-saw is balanced, but when I decide I’m no longer interested in the ride.

I was asked recently by another dancer for advice on putting music together for a performance. This depends, of course, on a wide variety of factors, so the best I can do is offer suggestions for combining music. I can’t really make specific recommendations, because everyone’s taste is so vastly different. For example, I absolutely worship at the altar of Janet Jackson, but my dancer friend Rocco up north is non-plussed by her and instead worships at the altar of Madonna. I love Madge, but my personal diva is Janet. So, there you have it. Taste is taste.

With that in mind, I would make the following suggestions when you’re in a situation where you can bring your own mix of songs:

1. Variety – this applies to genre, artists, tempo, mood, and texture. If you want several songs from a similar vein, break them up.
2. Brevity – avoid songs that play longer than 3-4 minutes. Attention spans are abbreviated in clubs. Unless the particular song is a banger that almost everyone loves (and will tolerate for 4-5 minutes), use shorter mixes.
3. Familiarity/Obscurity – gravitate towards music that is familiar, but throw in some surprises.
4. Sensuality – I personally don’t prefer pornographic clichés like “Me So Horny.” It’s actually embarrassing when some asshole DJ plays “I Wanna Fuck You in the Ass.” I mean really. Go for sexy, not trashy. You can get freaky without being a total freak (unless you’re performing for an audience that specifically fetishizes something in particular, then go balls-to-the-walls).
5. Interaction – select compositions that move you to involve the audience. Perhaps a sexy ballad gives you a reprieve, so you can stop gyrating around by yourself? Take a rest and give a volunteer from the audience a smoldering, blindfolded chair dance. Get creative though – that was the first example I came up with, because everyone does it. Think of new ways to flirt and make contact (where legal).</li> 

An example set that lasts about 30 minutes might look like this:

1. “These Words” Natasha Beddingfield (a fun, flirtatious opening)
2. “Erotica” or “Justify My Love” Madonna (absolutely smoldering)
3. Lords of Acid (high octane, humorously smutty, and lots of fun – take your pick on titles)
4. “Rope Burn” Janet Jackson or “Insatiable” Prince (for a slow jam interaction at the mid point), “Wicked Game” by Chris Isaac could be a more romantic alternative maybe?
5. “The Way I Live” Baby Boy the Prince or “Lean Like a Cholo” Down aka Kilo (a midtempo grinder with some swagger)
6. “Whatever You Like” TI or some other anthem that EVERYONE knows at least some of the words to and enjoys chanting along with
7. Missy Elliot (thick, sexy grooves that allow for interesting rhythms as you depart – take your pick on titles)

This past weekend I was supposed to see Janet Jackson in concert; however, she was sick, so after driving to Greensboro, NC I immediately had to turn around and drive back to Charlotte. That sucked. Really bad. We’re having a gas shortage, so I’m out the gas, I’m out the concert, and I’m out the night of work. To make it worse my new roommate’s dog attacked me when I got home, and when I decided to leave and go dancing just for fun for the first time in a year I found that my car had been egged so hard that the paint on my car is completely chipped off in some places. SUCK!

Anyway, I decide that October 4, 2008 is the best candidate for a “I’m gonna get drunk” night that I’ve had in a very long time. I go to clubs for fun so rarely that I almost want to use the word never; however, that’s not true, but you get the point. I’d not had a night off at home and been in the mood to go to a club in a year or more. So, away I went to Charlotte’s newest gay dance club: The Garden and Gun Club. It’s actually very posh, and I loved the environment; however, I had some situations come up that reminded me why I avoid going to clubs when I’m not working…

1. Within 10 minutes of getting there I was recognized by people who used to see me dance at Chasers, waaaaaaay back in the day. I was then, after much coddling (and 3 buttery nipples – yet another indulgence that happens rarely) wrangled into giving 3 lap dances to some chics who were there for a bachelorette party.
2. I was approached by an ecstasy queen whom I’d blocked on Manhunt, because he kept harrassing me to date him, even when I’d told him in person at a club that I wasn’t interested.
3. Some other people came up to me and started groping me (the #1 reason why I do not go to clubs when I’m not working: Other people don’t understand the difference between me being there as an entertainer and me being there as a patron). They then told me that I’d lost all my muscle mass (a ridiculous comment to make, given the fact that I’ve gained 30 pounds of lean mass in the year or more since they’d seen me last), and started making comments about my build and assessing me as if I were a horse up for sale. It was like I wasn’t even standing there. I was being completely objectified. I understand very well that this is part and parcel with what I do for a living, but it still seemed completely insensitive and beyond inappropriate for them to talk about me like I couldn’t speak English. Now I’m curious:

Would these people have felt it was okay to speak about me in such completely dehumanizing terms if they saw me as a person and not a personality or a sexual commodity?