Diary #3: Priestessing & Pole Dancing

I finally took a Dolly Bra home, our very last one. My friend Keleigh (who you can see in our Halloween sale!) had invited a bunch of us down to a club event to watch her perform. She’d mentioned I might be able to join her, but since I don’t know how to breathe fire (what she had been asked to do), I just packed up the strangest outfit I could put together in the five minutes before getting on the road -- the Dolly Bra, our new horns, stripey tights, the obligatory hotpants and corset and bitchin’ boots. No make-up even but lipstick, and then off we flew...

There were were, a few hours later, preening in front of a mirror resting nakedly on the dingy concrete floor of the backstage area, our bags perched on musty couches. Sharing perfume and glitter eye makeup with the other dancers, slicking back loose ends and tucking laces inside our boots, getting let in on the low-down by the promoter, an exuberant transwoman named Kat decked out in a naughty tuxedo top with a g-string. “You’re such a rock star,” my partner said to me as we ambled out of the dressing room and through the heavy metal door, flashing our flimsy, laminated STAFF passes.

“This is glamour?” I wondered. Lipstick-ringed cigarette butts and bathroom stalls without doors, borrowed heels and soggy business cards passed between sweaty hands?

I mounted a platform with another dancer already working a pole, dressed in fishnet and PVC. I began to notice that men would try to make shy eye contact with us, and would actually let their gaze stray from curves and skin if I lowered my eyes to meet theirs -- towering at their shoulder level, I had to look down on them. The DJ must be in my brain, I thought to myself, as he dropped a record I had shared with more than one lover, under last October’s moon, in last November’s chill kiss. My eyes burned to meet these onlookers. We were on the video monitors now, and when I could catch my image on the screen, I would dance back at myself, for myself...

“And why doesn’t Goddess live here, too?” I thought.

Big secret (not so secret) about me: I got drafted by the Goddess to Priestess when I was 18. I didn’t know what that meant. (And if I knew what I was getting myself into, do you think I’d have gone along with Her?) My friend’s moms were New Age-Buddhist-Pagan types and they wanted to have Summer Solstice with me and their sons -- so without really thinking too much about it, I sat down with The Spiral Dance and started writing a ritual for us. When I got to college a few months later, I was similarly drawn into the Pagan Students Organization, and before I knew it, I was running a whole Pagan retreat for Samhain... followed by Brigid... followed by Beltaine... and so on, and so on, and so on. I spent my whole Pagan “Coming Out” Priestessing, and it wasn’t until I was 21 that I got to step back and be truly Solitary again.

What does this have to do with go-go-dancing? It’s not that I stopped walking in the Priestess’s steps in the time I’ve spent outside of big, public rituals. I haven’t hung up my robes so much as I changed them -- and my robes were always pretty unconventional anyway!

What I’m learning is that people are going to see Goddess in my eyes if I just get out of my own way -- no matter who I am with, what I am wearing, or how “sacred” what I’m doing is. I walked into a rave this May, my body rocking immediately in the onslaught of sound and light and the shining faces of the dancers, and the pulpit of the DJ presiding over it all bathed in smoke, and I wondered, how were the ancient temples much different than this? We dance, we make rhythm in the synchronized pulse of hearts and drumbeats, we offer our sweat as a gift to Her and we dissolve into one sea of skin and spirit... into the raw stuff of everything... into Her embrace...

So from the vantage point of my go-go pole, I could smile. I could let some of that radiance come through me and let my worries and self-doubts slide sideways for a moment. I could listen to how my blood sang when my smile was met by another. Does he see a costumed diva in all her guiltless glory, or does he see the Divine Mother? After a certain point, one runs into the other... and the differences are made whole in the space between drum beats and dance steps and flutters of my eyelashes. We’re all worshipping in that moment at the altar of dreams and shared and temporary visions -- and in the imaginary time where I do desire him and he can desire me, we find something I don’t know what else to call but sacred, and nothing is so real...