The Way You Wear Your Face

by Giselle Renarde

A teacher once said to my mother, "There's steel in that girl."

At the time, she was right. Still, I fought back tears when my mother told me. I couldn't decide whether I should be proud. I knew it was true, but was it really so obvious?

The neighbourhood I grew up in was and is very different from the place I live now. Earlier today I was walking down the street and asking myself, "What would be the perfect soundtrack to give this area?" The first song that popped into my head was Pleasant Valley Sunday.

I'm trying to think of the perfect song to accompany the area I grew up in. It would be whatever music scares you shitless, really. Or just the sound of music through apartment walls and people screaming, and then a big crash and you sweating bullets and thinking, "Fuck, should I call the police?"

But of course you shouldn't because it's none of your damn business.

I can't pinpoint any event or moment that turned young Giselle into steel. It was home life coupled with where home was. My mom still lives in that same house, and when I tell people the intersection their eyes widen and they go, "Why?" or "Wow" or just "Yikes." Because why would anyone choose to live in such an unsavoury area?

That's a question I can't answer. I left as soon as I could. I left the steel there, too.

This came to mind the other week, when I was watching So You Think You Can Dance. There was a young woman on the show who had that same steel in her. She came from a rough neighbourhood, too. She faced addiction in her family.

I saw my old self in the way she wore her face: hard, inaccessible, a brick wall of a face. A face you don't want to mess with.

That was me, guys! That was me until I moved to a neighbourhood where I can walk around any time, day or night, and not be afraid. Sure it's weird, being poor and living in an incredibly affluent neighbourhood. I'm surrounded by ego and entitlement and it gets to me sometimes, but at the end of the day entitlement isn't going to steal your jewellery from around your neck or spray bullets from a car window.

Man, it feels good to not be afraid of the place you live. I'm practically Pollyanna when I'm out in the world. I talk to strangers! I smile at everybody! I love them all! Mwah-Mwah! Kisses all 'round!

And then I take the bus back to the neighbourhood where I grew up. Suddenly the smile in my eyes feels embarrassing. It makes me vulnerable. So I shut it down. I lock Pollyanna and her Pleasant Valley Sunday in the basement until I'm back at home base. Because I don't want to be targetted. I don't want to be picked out of the lineup. That one smiling face sticks out, on the bus to my mom's house.

But I feel odd about it. I love the compassionate me. She's my favourite kind of me! I want to share her with the people who live where I used to live. They're sort of like family, in a way.

I try, but I feel uneasy. The world I grew up in seems so predatory, so violent, so ready to take you down.

Out comes the steel, but I put it on like a mask now. It's not coming from the inside out. I'm wearing it so I'll blend in.

Sometimes I feel Pollyanna kicking and screaming, but I make her wear that mask. It's for her own good.

Bare Faced Truth

by Kristina Wright

I've never been good at being someone else. I'm a competent liar and capable of deception (fiction writers are, after all, the best liars), but to slip on the mask of a different personality entirely? I have never been able to do it competently. I couldn't even use a pseudonym for more than two erotica stories before I resorted to my real name for sanity's sake. Honestly, in most all situations, what you see is what you get with me. Is that good or bad?

There have been occasions where I wonder if it's good to be so... ME... all the time. Times when I wish I could be exotic or elegant or mysterious or simply more clever/smart/beautiful than I really am. Times when I wished I could fit in, belong, be one of the crowd, whatever the crowd is. I don't fit in anywhere--and I have given up trying. And I've discovered that it's very liberating to just be me. And sometimes it's fun to watch people try to reconcile the different aspects of who I am and make sense of it.

I used to enjoy dressing up in costume when I was younger, but the idea of going to a costume party right now me hives. I used to enjoy pretending to be someone else when I was a kid, but somewhere in the last twenty odd years, I kind of settled pretty well into my own skin and don't even want to bother. When we were teenagers, my friends and I would sometimes pretend to be British or French and affect accents to go along with new names. I always forgot my name and couldn't keep up the accent.

I am Kris or Kristina or Kristina Wright in everything I do. Every story I've written, with the exception of the two online stories I wrote over a decade ago, have been under Kristina Wright or some variation thereof. Kris Wright for my only gay erotic story, Lynn Cole (my middle name and maiden name) for an anthology that included two of my stories, Tina Simmons (the second half of my first name and my mother's maiden name, which was my legal name until I was 12) for a book that included three of my stories. All of my email addresses, with the exceptions of the ones for anthologies, are all variations of my real name.

Of course, using my real name doesn't mean people who don't know me in real life really know me. Reading my erotica (or any of my other fiction) may tell you a lot about my imagination, but it won't tell you much about who I am as a person, no matter how much a reader might assume otherwise. Reading the nonfiction I write, including my OGG posts, will give you a real glimpse into my life but it's only a snapshot, not the complete picture. The same with following me on various social networks or other blogs. All parts of the whole. Real, but incomplete.

Here's the truth-- no one really wants to know all of me, including the people who know me in real life. Maybe that's true for all of us who lurk on the fringes of several circles. Unless you're smack dab in the middle of whatever circle you're a part of, people are going to take what they're comfortable with and leave the rest in the closet. And that goes for the erotica writing circle, where my middle-aged, upper middle class life, 22 year marriage and 2 babies aren't very interesting, as well as for the suburban middle class circle, where my liberal politics, agnostic religious beliefs and erotica writing don't fit. I am not completely comfortable in any circle, but yet I can't even slip into the mask of what I'm supposed to be in order to fit into the circles I am a part of. Sigh.

I admire those writers who are able to slip in and out of their personas. I imagine it must be a relief to get to be someone else entirely, if only for a little while, and be completely accepted for being that particular identity. The masks authors wear are sometimes so believable that even I fall for them. I have been startled to realize that the names I've associated with some authors are actually pseudonyms. In fact, I once carried on lengthy email exchanges with two authors and didn't realize they were the same person until author A referenced the email I'd sent author B. The author wasn't trying to deceive me, but had assumed I was trying to keep the issues we were discussing separate. Ha! Now that is an author who is good at wearing a variety of masks-- and then there's me, taking everything at face value.

Does anyone really know me-- all of me? In truth, none of us is known (or knows anyone else) 100%. Human nature dictates that we keep something of ourselves private. Our secret hearts hold our most precious dreams and greatest fears, and we don't reveal all to anyone. On the other hand, anyone who has known me in real life or anyone who has access to the bulk of my online life could write a decent biography of me. And I'm okay with that. As I continue to struggle with my author "brand" I'm discovering that this is my brand-- being myself, being this very real person who has many facets, but only one name and one face-- and no masks at all.

Deliberate Misdirection

By Lisabet Sarai

You don't know me. Even if you're a regular visitor to the Grip, eagerly consuming my disclosures about my outrageous past - even if you've read every word I've ever published - you don't really know who I am. I'm sure you have some valid notions about what's important to me and what experiences shaped me - what makes me tick - but let me remind you: Lisabet Sarai is as much a fiction as the stories she creates.

I'm not saying that I've been lying. Not exactly. You can mostly trust the emotional content of both my posts and my tales. However, I've changed the facts to protect the innocent, which includes me as much as the many people in my past about whom I write. For practical reasons, I need to maintain a clear separation between my life in the everyday world and my author persona. I'm wary of giving out too many clues to my true identity. So I employ deliberate misdirection, sprinkling pseudofacts among the real ones and hoping that you can't tell the difference.

Every time I write a blog or join a social network discussion or email a reader, I'm donning a mask. I am Lisabet Sarai, glamorous doyenne of BDSM erotica, omnisexually voracious, polymorphously perverse, willing to believe that almost anything could be erotic under the right circumstances. I'm the Erotogeek, handing out advice on HTML and web scripting. I'm the Grammar Goddess, the Punctuation Princess, the Marketing Maven, a moderately senior member of the erotic author community. I'm the artist of alliteration who composes the monthly Erotic Lure for ERWA, full of double entendres and offhand commentary on my life as a happy submissive.

If you only knew what my real life was like! You'd laugh and shake your head, illusions dispelled. If you and I passed on the street, you'd never in a million years recognize me, though my head shot shows up all over the Internet. I was glamorous once, for about two hours, on the day that photo was taken. Sexually voracious? Not for a long time, alas! Imagination may be the ultimate aphrodisiac, but hormones unfortunately play a role. A happy submissive? Only in my dreams.

I put on Lisabet's mask to write these posts, and for a little while, I become the lusty, lascivious lady I always dreamed of being. I can pretend that I don't have arthritis, constipation, frizzy gray hair and a butt that's long since surrendered to gravity. I can relive my randy youth, leaving out all the tough parts, pretending that I really knew what was going on, when in fact I was totally lost.

You really don't know who I am. But perhaps you have some understanding of who I'd like to be.

****

My husband doesn't know me. We've been together for more than thirty years. We love each other deeply and get along so well that we've received marveling comments from other couples. Still, he has little understanding of Lisabet Sarai.

I think he views the hours I spend online, being Lisabet, as a somewhat frivolous waste of my valuable time. From a financial perspective, he may be right. He doesn't read my blog posts. He doesn't realize how I sincerely I miss the interactions with you, my peers and my readers, when my real world job keeps me away. All he knows is that it takes me hours to handle my daily email; totally immune to the social aspects of the Internet, he can't imagine why.

It's not that he disapproves of Lisabet. He's a fan of erotica - he had a significant collection already when we met. He reads many of my stories and has even critiqued a few for me. He won't read BDSM, though, or anything that includes sexual interaction between men. This isn't a question of bigotry or even disgust. He simply fails to understand why I find such things erotic.

BDSM especially. He and I had a wide range of sexual adventures in our younger days, but he has never been able to comprehend the thrill I get from dominance and submission. Because he loves me, he tried, early in our relationship, to stage a few D/s scenes, with a notable lack of success. The power exchange dynamic doesn't touch him at all. I tell him that I love him the way he is and that I don't need to submit to be fulfilled. The first statement is true; the second is a deliberate misdirection.

I don't want him to feel insecure, to worry that he does not satisfy my needs. And he does, as much, I believe, as any one individual can for another. Still, Lisabet Sarai's readers know how deeply I've been affected by my brief experiences with BDSM. A physical relationship that lasted only a few years has fueled more than a decade of fictional fantasies. I literally dream about submission. Then I wake next to my husband, feeling damp and guilty.

My husband knows me better than any other single person does, but even he doesn't know all of me. I wear a mask that hides the most extreme of my kinky fantasies from him. Instead I pour them out on the page - or here at the Grip - knowing he won't be around to be disturbed.

We all don masks sometimes, to protect ourselves and the ones we love. Authors, though, especially authors of erotica, spend their lives hiding behind a veil of illusion. We can't escape. To be honest, I'm not sure I'd want to. I love my Lisabet mask - even if I have to tell some white lies to keep it intact.