Phases of the Writing Life: Hide or Drag-Dance

When I get away from my writing projects (the Yokel Songs, for example), it's easy for me to get into a mental frame of thinking I may be done with them forever. 

But that's just the old familiar hiding phase.

A force sinisterly allied with the current abusive right-wing regime makes me suppress myself, both my erotic self-love and the energy that I put into poetry.

In the hiding phase, poetry is shameful -- it's a kind of drag-dancing for myself.

I can easily become ashamed and fearful -- this shame going back to my childhood hatred of my own feet, which by my late adolescence had become erotic love of my own feet.

Throughout my school years I was subjected to gender policing that made me fear and deny gay tendencies in myself.

I had no concept of trans-ness, of wanting to be a woman, until late in life when I was asked to write my pronouns on a name badge -- they-them felt much better than he-him.

I really do fear that the regime may decide to exterminate people like me -- people who get immense pleasure out of erotic self-love, and who are transexual, or at least experiment a lot with being trans. 

People who actually try to change their gender, of whom I have several family members, are now having their rights, possibly even citizenship rights, and even right to live, revoked.

When I am working on my writing, I relish its queer auto-erotic component, which the regime would condemn as pathological. 

That's the joyful drag-dancing phase.

I feel that my writing resists the woke-hating, trans-hating regime we live under, so I feel that it may do good to show myself as a queer poet -- to dance my drag for others not just myself.

At the same time, I don't feel right about promoting my work -- for example, by publishing it in Substack and asking people to subscribe.

The collections as published on my blog reveal my true self as plainly as anything possibly could. 

I do wish others might see it -- to make that more likely, I've started posting photos of poems from the Selected Doomed Yokel collection in my blog at johnwenstrom.com on my Facebook feed.

It strikes me now that I could post this essay on Substack.