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Thursday, January 25, 2007

Sexerati Interviews: Gina de Vries

filed under: Erotic Elite, Sexerati Interviews by Melissa Gira

Gina de Vries is a queer writer from San Francisco, but in true bicoastal perversion, we met back East when we were both calling the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts ‘home’ and making trouble in its woods, cafes, and dorms. At the time, she was co-editing, with Diane Anderson-Minshall, [Becoming]: young ideas on gender, identity, and sexuality, and was in the middle of her 7 year tenure as a columnist for Curve magazine. Look for her in Tough Girls 2: Down and Dirty Dyke Erotica, Transforming Communities, Baby, Remember My Name: An Anthology of New Queer Girl Writing, First-Timers, That’s Revolting!: Queer Resistances to Assimilation and The On Our Backs Guide to Lesbian Sex. I interviewed Gina this afternoon, passing a laptop back and forth as we listened to the street cars roll by, back in our real home now, San Francisco.

Finish the following sentence: Gina de Vries is…

A queer writer, activist, and sex nerd from San Francisco who blogs at queershoulder and dreams of one day having a lofty writing job and a clawfoot bathtub.

When did you first know you were a sex nerd?

In my early teens. I was one of those precocious early-nineties sex-positive baby queers raised on Susie Bright and Carol Queen. I’d been doing queer activism forever – mostly around safer school issues – and because of my queer political work, I’d had a lot of interactions with older folks in the bi and trans and leather communities, and gone to riot grrrl conventions, etc. It was those early interactions with older LGBT and leather folks and my involvement in the mid-nineties grrrl scene that really shaped both my sexual and political outlook today… Anyway, I’ve always collected writing and historical memorabilia about sexual minority communities – I’ve got a huge collection of grrrl zines, I still read everything I can get my hands on about queer history, I’m perversely fascinated by bad lesbian separatist books and records – and I had this kind of insane collection of queer and sex books for a teenager. I had a new year’s eve party when I was around sixteen, and a straight girl friend of mine (who has since then become both a dyke and a sex nerd herself) discovered my copy of Sexual State of the Union and started reading sections of it to all of us dramatically. I sort of snatched the book away from her defensively, and said it was really good and earnestly encouraged her to read Susie Bright. And then all these friends of mine started borrowing my Susie Bright books…!

We’re as obsessed with sex & sexuality as we are how people study it, and you’re one of the few people I know who survived academia, not only writing about sex, but outing yourself as a real live sexual person, which is sadly still way too shocking to those people who hand out degrees. How did you come out in your study of sex as one of “those” people who usually gets studied, not the kind of person who gets the paper for doing the studying herself?

Not being out – as queer, as a sexual being in general – has never felt like an option for me. I was doing a creative writing thesis my final year of college, and got told repeatedly that because I was writing material that was sexual in nature and about queer and trans folks that I should just be working in queer studies, or women’s studies. This was at a college that was known for it’s diversity and radicalism and open-mindedness!

The message was very clear – if you were writing about sex, you had to be writing about sex from a social science perspective, not a creative perspective and certainly not a personal or community perspective. My totally non-pornographic work (and I do write porn, but I wasn’t turning my porn in to my thesis committee) was called pornographic and exhibitionistic because it was about bi people and trans people and poly people and sex workers. It was nuts. If I’d been a lesbian writing about my married life with my female partner and dog and house, with a tasteful fade-to-black around sex scenes – it would have been different. It was that I was writing about sexuality in a complicated way, and talking about queer lives that don’t operate in a mainstream, married, heteronormative way.

And the thing is, I’d done a lot of queer theory and taken a lot of queer history courses, because that community history in particular totally fascinates me – but my real calling is as a writer, and I get so annoyed with being one of the people who is “studied.” I have a very love/hate relationship with academia – I’m such a good student, school has always been super-easy for me, I love working with ideas and picking apart things that are difficult – and I also feel this constant need to remind people that all this theory is about people’s real lives.

In addition to all your writing, and getting published in the kinds of anthologies that future sex nerds are going to have all up on their own shelves, you’ve been a feature at numerous readings and even did some touring. Can you tell us about a really hot, memorable, or powerful time on stage?

My all-time favorite reading story: I shared a stage with Kris Kovick at the Bearded Lady Café – back when it still existed – when I was 12. It was me, and five totally awesome and much, much older queer writers, doing a benefit for LYRIC, the queer youth center I was involved in. I forget exactly what I read – some bad 12-year-old girl poems that were vaguely Allen Ginsberg-inspired, most likely – but what I remember about that performance was that Kris was just phenomenal. She read this scary, gritty piece about Aileen Wuornos and picking up this female hitch-hiker who’d met a man who raped her while hitch-hiking, and faked giving him a blowjob, shoved a thermometer up his dick, and broke it. I was just starting to deal with my own survivor stuff, and it was the most amazing story about triumph I’d ever heard. I feel so blessed that I got to hear Kris – let alone perform with her – before she passed.

How can our readers catch up on project Gina? What’s next for you right now?

Well, I’m featuring at Queer Open Mic in San Francisco on Friday, January 26. People in the Bay Area should come see me! I post about readings and general things that I’m up to queershoulder.livejournal.com. I’ve got a website in the works. And I’ll be one of the performers in the Transforming Communities show for the National Queer Arts Festival in June 2007.

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