April 30th 2009
email from me
So.
Christ, I don’t even know what to say. I mean… my mind is all jumbled.
I wanted to explain things. About why… I got so upset about the “exhibitionist” thing.
Exhibitionists…. get off on the attention. They are naked just for the sexual attention it brings them. Or… even in a non sexual context… the intent is only for attention. While I am pleased when my works get attention, it’s not because the image is of ME, but because it’s an image I created. There’s a stark difference there, right? Even in… the wacky way I dress sometimes… it’s not BECAUSE of the attention it might bring, but in spite of it. I don’t understand how most of the world sees things, I don’t get every day perceptions. I appreciate you explaining these things to me when you feel it’s important – I really do. But it isn’t always going to curb my actions. And…. just because you tell me how the lowest common denominator of humanity may percieve things I do, that doesn’t mean that if I continue with my actions that I’m…. asking for / seeking out that sort of attention. It just means I do what I do in spite of the negative.
And…
I…. think I may have misconstrued some of my pasts. Or you may have misinterpreted them. The “walking around naked in front of my friends” has gotten rather blown out of proportion. I might stumble into the bathroom from my bedroom naked at night, be naked in my bedroom in the summer, strip to my underwear when I got home in a hot NYC apartment, sunbathe in my yard, think nothing of it to get changed in front of a platonic friend… but I even asked Geoff, and he said he just remembered me hanging out in a towel dying my hair all the time. It’s that I never considered anything of it. I never saw any particular morality lines regarding nudity – there just wasn’t anything SEXUAL or inappropiate about it to me. That’s rather the opposite of being an exhibitionist. I mean, I wasn’t greeting my roomates in the morning wearing nothing but a chef’s hat serving them scrambled eggs or anything.
The same goes with the webcam hooplah. I’d…. i’d mentioned that when first we started talking not as some badge of accomplishment…. but exactly the opposite – because you’d said that you had ominous type stuff in your pasts…. and I’d offered that up to try and make things more comfortable – more even. It’s NOT something I’m proud of, but that attitude is only in retrospect, in a further understanding of what that actually was. My girlfriend was a cam girl, but she posed it to me as her attempt to emulate Ana Voog, a new-wave type art chick who started the first 24 hour cam as some sort of art installation. I lived with my girlfriend, and for 4 months or so, I, too was part of her 24 hour cam show. It’s never something I’d have done otherwise. I honestly thought it was silly and ridiculous than anyone would care enough to want to watch. It was most often just me sitting at the computer, typing. Or us fighting, most likely.
You’d quoted me as saying “I’d rather be naked on stage than [fill in the blank].” I only say that when in reference to singing or dancing in public – because to me, those are the most vulnerable and exposing experiences I could imagine; the equivalent, I imagine, to how most other people would feel being naked on a stage in front of hundred.
But that’s all not the point. The point…. the thing that upset me is… even if I HAD been romping about stark naked all the time… even if 80% of my photographs were nude…. my intent is not for personal attention. I’ve never seen nudity as anything shameful, or particularly tantalizing…. and until relatively recently, I found nothing sacred about it at all.
It’s not that you said particularly hurtful words to me.
It wasn’t that I thought you weere being mean… or trying to undermine my artistic goals or anything… or telling me what to do…
It’s that I thought you had an understanding of that aspect of me, and…. the idea that you’d think…. to whatever extent… that I was just…. presenting myself to the world like that….
For you to explain so definitively that because I’d told you I’d been a cam girl, that because I’d said I used to be “naked all the time”, that because I have nude images of myself….. that you’d find “exhibitionist” the only / logical conclusion…. I mean, perhaps you didn’t mean it in a purely sexual way (though the word is most often used in such a context), but even otherwise… I thought you knew… that I’d explained… and to know that you see part of me in such a way… which is so far from my intent… yes, it does bring me to tears.
…. you can’t have any idea how very important your opinion is to me. How every crucial your point of view, your critical eye, your interpretation of the world is to me. How very often I strive to accomplish something hoping more than ANY other reason that I might feel that I’ve earned some degree of pride in your eye. You are my chosen audience of one, and I want to earn your attention/applause/approval…. far more often (and intently) than I have any sense of self preservation.
I want to…. maybe….. be someone you are proud of knowing…. the way I’m proud of knowing you. I can’t possibly hurt myself as much as a disapproving gaze from you can wound me to the core.
I’m sure I’m being a bit hyper-emotional these days. I’m warring with myself at trying not to be as terrified and doomed-feeling about how much everything in my life is about to change at once…. how it’s going to rip away from me the places/means/ways I most think of of our times together…. and that’s really what I hold most precious in my life… I’d probably be less weepy and wounded about your casual words if that wasn’t going through my head all the time…. how much things will change, my schedule will be yanked out of my hands… and I’ll be living a life so very far away from yours. So distant. And I’m afraid it’s all going to fade away.
It already hurts.
You mean way too much to me, I guess.
I feel like it’s far more than appropriate, and I’m really trying to control myself.