Every night, the moon changes. Dancing, shifting, like a long slow wink or an elaborate fan dance. She is dark, hiding, then a fingernail of light; waxing, she dances to full; then waning, disappearing to dark again. Every twenty-eight days, she spins her strip tease across the sky, coupling with stars, making halos of the clouds, shining gloriously. Somehow, for most of my life, I didn’t notice this. Once in a while, I would look up and see, oh hey, the moon looks cool. But I never bothered to track where it was coming from or moving to, or any affect on me.
I have never had a regular period. I don’t bleed unless I induce it with a pill, which I do sometimes, but not enough to have a real menstrual cycle. I identify as genderqueer, and have felt since childhood that I was at least partly a boy, but I also for most of my life really wanted to be a woman. I believed that to be a woman was to menstruate, to have a vagina that felt like a natural and pleasurable part of the body, to have a womb that could hold and birth life. And these were not my experiences.
Try taking a thick canvas strap and wrap it around your hips. Pull it as tight as you possibly can, tighter still, a little more each day, and buckle it over your pelvis, a metal ring right where you imagine a womb might live. Now imagine this strap is holding your leg on, a prosthetic that doesn’t fit right, that makes you tense up all the muscles in your ass and pelvis. Try walking around, living your life, trying to act normal. This was my experience from age four to age twenty-seven. That strap, pulled and fastened to hold myself together, tighter and tighter over the years, measuring my restraint. I would bleed out of my side, painful oozing sores where the strap cut into me. My bones grew indented from the pressure. My body went numb before it got to blossom. I could sense touch, like a poke or a tickle, but I couldn’t send a signal down to any part of my body from the inside to receive sensation as pleasure. I worked hard to cope with the detachment. I found ways to adapt.
What is sex if you can’t feel your body, can’t open your heart to pleasure? For me, it was roleplay, validation, intensity of emotion. I had grown up reading the porn found in fathers’ secret stashes. By the time I started dating, in my late teens and early twenties, it was in the context of a cocky group of young queers who were happy to be perverts, who wanted to be hot and hard and pound it out. I believed in freedom of sexual expression, but I didn’t understand sexual intimacy. I felt powerful as a dirty punk, immersed in politics. I rarely bathed, I smoked cigarettes, my apartment was a mess. I didn’t understand how to keep a plant alive because I would forget to notice what it needed.
I made art, I sent zines all over the country, I wrote rock operas and went to punk shows. I lived alone and had nightmares about being watched, invaded. I painted the ceramic head of a broken fairy statue, blue and purple with jewels over her eyes, and posted the head on a pole outside my apartment as protection. I had a cat that I treated as my equal, and imagined she and I as a witch and her familiar, living in a magical hut, spinning our own reality. I interpreted the messages of the culture, playing them out through fantasy and fashion: I was a pretty princess and a metal head dude, a fat Barbie and a Disney villain. I mocked what I perceived as softness, wishy-washyness. I assumed that things like moon goddess worship weren’t cool or hot or revolutionary (oh, what I thought I knew).
Like the moon’s dance, the pathway from disconnection to embodied pleasure is not linear, and it doesn’t happen all at once. I had to chart a path internally, feeling out into the world to reach back into myself, finding out what it’s like to be human by slowly easing into this weird body thing. I finally got rid of the strap, and faced the pain and terror that I knew would be waiting for me when I began to inhabit my body. I struggled to support myself in a big city, so I worked as a phone sex operator, listening to men’s fantasies and pretending to be the girl they desired: small and blonde, young and hairless and two-legged. At first, it was interesting, but I soon grew resentful that there were so many avenues for men to fulfill their fantasies, while I was now in my thirties and had barely gotten a glimpse of my own desire, my own internal clock or sense of flow or change or sensuality.
The antidote to that disconnection was the love of the moon. To feel it, I had to first notice it. I would go outside on the nights around the full moon and talk to her, telling myself that those passing me on the busy street probably wouldn’t notice my murmuring as anything out of the ordinary. I quietly praised the moon and waited to feel something in return.
It was a few years before I had the vision of moonlight on my pussy, tickling along the edge of each fold of pink. Silver blue tingle and ripple of pleasure, an invitation to a deeper now. When I went to my room, to my Hitachi, I imagined the moon’s bright face shining into me, rubbing wet and open into my membranes. As she waned to a sliver she would sing and sigh like a bow playing my edges, a high-frequency tease, lighting up each ruffle, swelling me into awareness.
Then, this past December, my partner and I spent a month in a cabin in the woods in the Pacific Northwest. I announced my intention to go outside with the full moon and bare myself, and this became an excitement between us, this full-pussy-mooning. The day we knew the moon would be full, we watched the gray overcast sky all afternoon wondering, Would she make an appearance? That night, I put on a white dress with no bloomers and readied myself for my date with the moon.
The sky had a reddish tone, the moonlight diffuse in the cloud covering. I walked up the dark path to the labyrinth, a gravel path winding inward, untangling into the center. This labyrinth was built as a place of refuge for women to walk and contemplate. As I stood in the center and looked up toward the trees, the shining full moon burst out of the clouds. I giggled and squealed, threw my arms in the air. Pulled up my skirt and lay down on a stone bench, legs spread toward the moon so I could get her light on me. It was cold, so cold, and the trees formed a circle of sentinels around me.
This is the most vulnerable I can be, laying pussy-out in the world. It is scary — and exciting. I soak it up, trying not to be too on-guard, occasionally jolted by a crackle or rustle that makes me wonder if someone is coming. But nobody is around. I breathe and rock my hips, feeling the creak and stretch, the subtle squeak of pleasure sliding against the hardness of history. The moon is far far above me, like the light in the hospital room so many years ago, but unlike that light, she loves me, she wants me, she knows I’m in here, and she knows I deserve to feel good. I breathe in rhythm. Squeeze and release. Eventually, I feel a sense of separation again and grow colder, and realize she has hidden her face.
When it is time to walk back out through the winding pathway, I am not different, but I am different. I have felt her light on me, the fantasy I’ve been holding. Thank you, moon. In darkness, I walk back to the cabin where my girlfriend sits at the computer, editing photos. I go up into the loft and moan and grind on the vibrating magic wand, the wet mushroom of my clit licking the moon’s soft surface. In my mind’s eye, I see her hiding behind the clouds, then getting brighter, brighter, and then, boom, she is here, glowing round and closer, shining for me, and I come in a wash of sweetness. “You’re hot,” says my girlfriend from downstairs.
I have so much to learn about beauty and desire, reflection and projection, giving and receiving open-heartedly and consensually. What does it mean to be looked at, to be beautiful but not objectified? To play with the darkness, to reveal in stages without artifice? To be projected upon and to shine back the light of love. To have a self that is not able to be captured. The moon is a lover and a teacher. She shows what she wants to when she wants to. She makes us wait. She gives generously in her own time, tugging at our tides, pulling at our bodies. Even if we don’t bleed, we feel her pull, we feel our hearts rise in response to her glow. The more I pay attention, and the more I learn to participate in her dance, the more pleasure and beauty I find in my world. This is accessible to all who seek flux and flow, decadence and resonance, regardless of gender or body parts.
As I begin to speak of these experiences, I find that this moon-sex vibe is happening all around me, resonating from within many of our bodies, and this gives me hope: That the trauma of sexism, colonization, and the medicalization and mechanization of our bodies and spirits is being undermined by this powerful, unstoppable force that operates on its own terms. Thank you to the women and healers who have kept this knowledge throughout time, for their love and patience as we discover what is true within each of us.
Here is a song that my partner and I wrote about the moon, in that cabin in the woods, just as it turned midnight on New Year’s eve:
https://ganserlamm.bandcamp.com/track/shes-on-our-side
Transcript
She’s On Our Side
The moon is dancing and she wants to see
All the funny stuff we do inside our buildings
Where moss grows so thick that ferns grow out of it
Why do we stay in side? What are we hiding?
Nothing she hasn’t seen… nothing she hasn’t seen…
The moon in her changing room, she’s playing hide & seek with you
She’s peeking through the window, she entices you to follow
Outside, feel below the street, below your feet
Where the energy meets the pound of the most mighty heartbeat
And breathlessly carries you through all the loopholes you hold in your mind
Unwind, from the tightness you carry inside, go along for the ride…
Brightness and hardness, glowing and light, clear night
A sliver, a full round and swelling, pull back, see the other half
You can’t see me, I’m new, you can only see half of my body
Feel the beam between the you and the me
Eclipse your lips, parted and swelling, the darkness, the quickening
Crashing like waves, see water rise, she’s on our side
Healing and haunting, silver and sultry, she’s on our side
You thought she died, she’s just new
She’s on our side…
[Headline image: The watercolor painting shows a naked woman with brown hair and a prosthetic left leg. Her prosthesis is black and white on the top, and red striped on the bottom, ending in a black shoe. Her eyes are closed, and she is raising her hands over her head. Above her, the moon appears white inside concentric circles of gray, tan, and brown. A band of brown and a band of blue emerge from the moon. Green trees are visible to either side, with a brown landscape behind and a brown cloud next to the moon. Copyright Nomy Lamm.]
