Dreaming Sins, Cripping Sex: Talking to Sins Invalid  

It was a dark and stormy afternoon when I took a cab to Sins Invalid headquarters in Berkeley. Sins’ co-founder artistic director, Patty Berne, and co-founding member/performer, Leroy Moore, had made some time for me to talk with them about their upcoming 5^th anniversary show at Z Space in San Francisco April 8-10, 2011. We talked about community, coalition-building, the meaning of disability, and of course, sex!

Here are some highlights from our interview.

Virgie: I love to ask people in interviews to tell me about who they are. So, who are you? What is your identity?

Leroy: That could cover books. For me, I identify as a Black, disabled, activist, poet, journalist.

Patty: I think of identity vis-a-vis communities. So the communities I most identity with are the queer community and mixed-race communities. My mother is from Japan and my father is from Haiti. There’s a lot of commonality amongst children who are first-generation born here. So, I have a lot of community with folks who are first-generation. In terms of identity, my identity as woman of color is the first thing that comes to my mind. And also, I’m certainly disabled.

Virgie: Tell me about surprises in terms of performance, in terms of impact, in terms of whatever comes to mind.

Patty: Well, the whole thing is a frickin’ surprise! Sins Invalid is an experiment unfolding. There have been a series of beautiful, beautiful surprises. It changes every year, as hopefully everyone in the organization develops. In thinking about the audience, in the beginning, I was stunned that other people were surprised that a show on disability and sexuality would be hot. I wouldn’t expect that people would not expect that. If it was a show about Black gay men and sexuality people would be scandalized and too scared to attend, but because it’s a show about disability and sexuality people actually brought their kids! Frankly, not a good idea. This performance always contains adult sexual content. It’s not pornographic, but it’s definitely erotic and I really don’t think an 11 year old needs to be exposed to explicit content. So, that was a big surprise.

Some of the surprises have been the development of the organization from being based primarily in performance to really being a grounding place for community. That really speaks to our social and political conditions, as there really aren’t a lot of places for people who live at these intersections – people of color, people with disabilities, people who are queer, gender variant – people who have historically been marginalized by various social justice movements or the disability rights movement because of one facet of their identity or another. I don’t think I was expecting the kind of traction it would get. It’s great to have identified a real need, but it also speaks to the reality that there aren’t more spaces.

Every year the performance is a transformation for all of us. It’s phenomenal. Surprising? Yes. Life changing? Yes. The process of incubating and creating the performance, including being in the presence of so many artists who are willing to embody love, embody eroticism in non-normative bodies in powerful ways. It’s phenomenal.

It’s a little bit of a surprise that we’ve been doing it for five years! Because when we started we just thought it would be one-time thing at La Pena.

Leroy: I think for me in terms of impact, it’s finally seeing and hearing our stories out in the public and on stage. For me, growing up Black and disabled, I never saw another Black disabled man on stage, seeking truth and knowledge. So that for me makes a huge impact. I think it makes community members see that disability is more than an “I” situation, it’s a “we.” It’s really important to connect stories of today with stories of yesterday, and that’s what this year’s show is doing.

Patty: The theme of this year’s show is Knotting Stories Over Time & Geography.

Virgie: Define disability.

Patty: How many hours does this recorder have? It’s not a short answer. The way that I think about disability is about context. So for example, when I’m doing political education training, I have what I need to do that training, and my mobility impairment is not really an impediment. My capacity is a good fit for my environment. However, if I were a fire fighter people, that would be a bad fit – people would die! Climbing ladders, holding giant hoses – that’s just not a good idea for me! Point being, there’s an environmental context. For some of us that are near-sighted, in North America, if we have the money, we just go to an optometrist, we get adaptive devices, and it’s not considered a disability. If we were in the Sahel, and we had to see really far in order to track our herds, it might be significantly disabling if we did not have access to adaptive devices. Again, there’s a context around a person’s ability. So, the artist Prince, whom I love and adore with all my heart and soul, rocks on stage – however, he might have a psych disability that would make him a bad pre-school teacher, for example. I’m not saying that people with disabilities aren’t impacted by the ways in which we’re different, but the reality of the human condition is that everyone has different capacities and everyone has different needs. I don’t go with the idea that everyone is disabled; I am saying that everyone is human. What ends up being disabling is not necessarily the condition of what we can or can’t do in any given place, what ends up disabling us is the marginalization, the violence, the dehumanization that we experience when we fall outside of a normative framework. Who is considered disabled has to be understood in context, and that context includes not just the axis of ability but all the other axes and social frameworks that we exist in – race, gender, age, etc.

Leroy: Also, going back to history again, who has the power to define a people or a community? People with disabilities are often defined by others. You have a history of other people defining us and of course there’s the legal definition…the question is who gets to define us and say what our story is.

Patty: In this country, people with disabilities are typically defined by either the US government and its employability standards, or the medical industrial complex. So, for example, people who are gender variant can be designated as disabled under the DSM (Diagnostic & Statistical Manual) – that speaks very much to the structural powers of definition.

Virgie: My next question is for Leroy. You’re always naked on stage! Do you identify as kinky? Do you just love being naked or was this something that was performance-based?

Leroy: A lot of the writing for the show stems from Patty.

Patty: That’s true in terms of Leroy’s performances. He’s an awesome performer. He occupies space really beautifully. He moves really beautifully. He speaks really beautifully. He communicates really well from the stage. And so a lot of pieces he’s performed in – expect this year – are pieces that I’ve written and asked him if he wanted to perform in them. We knew that Leroy would be pegged with having the kink, but I actually wrote all the pieces.

Virgie: Ah, so you’re the kinky one?

Patty: I’m a total fucking pervert. Yeah.

Leroy: I also think that American society has this weird, weird relationship to the body. If you only watched the mass media, you’d think that America just adores one type of body. All the rest are pushed into the closet. I think that Sins really pushes that closet open.

Patty: And we are really conscious of the fact that Leroy is a thin Black man, and that Black men have been eroticized in a racialized way in this culture and in history, and we are aware of the potential to substitute a thin disabled Black man for a thin able-bodied white woman in the cultural gaze. It’s transgressive, but to a point. Leroy did S/M scenes three years in a row, but we didn’t just want to establish his body as a new iconic acceptable form. So this year we decided, no naked thin Black men!

Virgie: I wanted to ask about intersections. Where do you see your intersections with the fat movement, poc movements, queer movements. Where do you see yourselves in relation to these movements?

Patty: I think there are multiple parallels with fat activism. Before working with Nomy Lamm, we worked with an MC named Lady Venus. It’s about being marginalized based on an idea of normativity. People that are “othered” are not considered sexual because we’re big, or because we’re disabled, or because we’re older than what people think of as sexual. There are all kinds of absurdly null and void concepts around sexuality that play a huge role in our lives because they have a fair amount of cultural support and air time. This normative idea of the “right” body and sexuality attempts to shape us as queer people, as people of color, as genderqueer people…I think there are multiple overlaps between marginalized communities, and I think it would benefit broader social justice movement building if more people started participating in that movement building from multiple communities, from their intersections. At Sins, we are necessarily quite multi-faceted although we are a small group of people, and we welcome people to make connections.

Virgie: So how did Sins begin? What was the moment when this was idea was conceived?

Leroy: I think it was many moments, because Patty and I have been really good friends from before Sins, and have this connection through our politics and our art. About 5 years ago, Patty and I had videos out that were really hot. And we were having dinner at La Pena, at this Flamenco Dance performance, and we were like “Goddamn, that is so fricking beautiful.”

Patty: And I swear the lead dancer was queer. He came over to our table and gave us free tickets. And when he danced, he danced his role so queer. It was so beautiful.

Leroy: And we realized that what we were watching was so beautiful, but we never see ourselves on stage, disabled people and people of color with radical politics. So, we thought these films were an opportunity to do something new, and our friend Todd Herman – he’s a great ally to the disabled community – and Patty and I sat down and talked about our ideas for a show. And pretty soon we realized that we needed to do something bigger than just with our friends.

Patty: There are actually four founders of Sins. Todd, Amanda, Leroy and myself. Todd and Amanda at this point have moved into different roles in relation to Sins Invalid. They’re both white and they’re both able-bodied, and they were committed about the leadership really needing to be very clearly and strongly from the communities that are most impacted by ableism and racism. They now advisors and close community members, but not in organizational leadership anymore.

Virgie: I want to hear about your sexualities!

Patty: It’s interesting, changing, as I’m getting older. I’m 44, and I’ve been sexually active since I was a teenager, became interested in S/M in my mid-20s and have been peripherally involved in S/M for a while now. When I was younger I used to need a shit-ton of stimulation. As I’m getting older, I’m appreciating a level of focus and intimacy that I never thought I would. Before I needed a lot, a lot, a lot of stimulation. I’m a survivor of sexual assault and so I think that had a big impact on my sexuality as well, like the piece Leroy did last year, it was a medical scene that he performed and I wrote. That was in some ways me trying to reconcile my body having been on display in the medical industry and the way that as an adult I really enjoy objectification and “being examined” and how I essentially had taken things that are painful and re-infused them with an erotic charge so that I could metabolize and understand them. Every year I think my sexuality is developing. Until the last couple years I identified as a total fucking perv – and now less so. I don’t necessarily need pain now, for example. Good eye contact is hot, lots of things I didn’t appreciate for years I really can sink into now. I think I’m getting to a place where I’m a little more settled in myself, which is nice.

Virgie: Speaking of metabolizing and processing trauma or marginalization through our sexuality, as a fat-bodied woman I’ve noticed the way that sexual capital on an otherwise marginalized body can be a way that we try to pass.

Patty: Yes.

Virgie: And for me a lot of my sexuality became centered in my boobs because my boobs are erotic capital. I have these big boobs and I know that people really like boobs and we’re a very boob-centric culture and so what I found was that I was shoving all of my erotic desire away from the parts of my body that weren’t “ok,” like my tummy or my arms or my jiggly thighs, and they became the seat of all that I was as an erotic person. So, I’m relating to what you’re saying.

Patty: Oh, I think that’s why I got into phone domination…because my voice is very normative. I’ve been told all my life that I have a very sexy voice, whatever that means. And with Sins, many of us now have an opportunity to explore what is sexy for us. I’m really psyched because this year we’re talking about cripping sex. So, for example, one performer, Maria Palacios, is doing a piece about loving her body and about the parts of her body that she thought were not acceptable. She’s talking about the “magic aces” of her breasts with able-bodied lovers, trying to distract them from her legs, and at the same time she sets limits to what she’ll allow people access to. And in the next piece she’s performing we partnered with Sean Dorsey (Fresh Meat Productions) and we did this entire strip that’s based on her legs. It’s really exciting. So, the idea of cripping sex is embodying how we are sexual in our crip bodies, not mimicking able-bodiedness or normative standards. It’s not in spite of our being non-normative, it is because of non-normativity that we’re hot. Because if we can embody all that, how much power must we have? And as we all know power – at the end of the day – is pretty fucking sexy.

Leroy: Wow. For me growing up in a family that was totally activist oriented I didn’t have time to really figure out about sexuality. I think about my friends in the ‘80s, we were all disabled, we were all playing wheelchair soccer, we were all males, and we were all buff at the time. We saw each other 6 years ago, and we talked about our bodies as disabled men, looking at our bodies when we were younger, being involved with sports and having an athletic body image even though we were disabled. I didn’t really think about the way that other people viewed me because I really didn’t give a fuck, I didn’t delve into my sexuality until late high school, early college. Now being older, I view my sexuality as something that’s one part of me, and I’m really exploring that. I’m in a relationship now, and it’s one of my first deep relationships and it’s amazing how people with disabilities unfortunately…not all, but a lot of people with disabilities wait until we are older when they explore that experience. It’s sad in some ways, but I’m glad I’m having the opportunity to explore it. Some other people with disabilities won’t explore that experience.

Patty: I really appreciate your saying that. I think that’s what I was referencing earlier in terms of the dehumanization around disability and the fact that people with disabilities are seen as asexual or there’s a fear response amongst people – “Oh, don’t think about them like that. They’re disabled.” As though automatically there’s an exploitive situation if you’re being sexual with someone with a disability, as though people with disabilities don’t have desire or don’t have agency. I’m not saying that there isn’t a huge rate of violence against people with disabilities, there is. And that has to do with the ways in which we are dehumanized, we’re not seen as fully human. The dehumanization can take the form of outright violence, and it can also take the more silent form of negating our sexuality. Sexuality is a part of being human. Some people with disabilities may not have the opportunity to engage in a sexual relationships with other people; I think it’s important not to give the power of our sexual identities into someone else’s hands. We have to own our experience of our own sexualities. The world is not going to mirror me. I’m aware of that. As a person with a disability, I must mirror and love myself, find myself desirable. And in this culture, that is not just a personal act, that is an absolutely transgressive act.

Leroy: It’s so funny that someone can sometimes be the strongest advocate for somebody else, but when it comes to being an advocate for yourself…I worked at a summer camp for people with disabilities for years, the last year I was the director. We had all ages of participants. We had these two people, a couple that was older, 50-somethings, and they lived in a nursing home. And in their nursing home they couldn’t live together, sleep together. So, at camp, we totally destroyed that rule! At first the counselors came up to me and said “Are you sure we can do this?” and I said, “Hell yeah! We’re going to do this! We’re going to give them their own cabin and they’re going to live together for two weeks at camp.” But it’s interesting that I could do that for somebody else but at that time I couldn’t do it for myself.

Virgie: Leroy, I’m curious about your piece in the show. I don’t want you to give it all away, but if you could sort of talk about the way that it’s evolved.

Leroy: I’m collaborated on this year’s piece with Juba Kalamka. He’s a Black queer man living in Oakland, and we sat down in the beginning of the process to talk about Black males and growing up. He’s queer, and I’m disabled, and we just had conversations on our childhoods. He grew up in Chicago in a community of Black nationalists and he’s exploring his own sexual identity in that context. We talked about how our parents dealt with disability – his mother has polio, but wasn’t really out and open about it at the time. This was pre-ADA (American with Disabilities Act) disability culture. We just talked about our childhood and through the talking we came up with this piece where two Black men are playing dominoes, just throwing out terms like “queer” and “faggot” and “crippled” and stuff like that. As it developed, it went from two Black men having an argument to a Black gay couple having an argument. So, that turned the whole piece: the feel and the emotion.

Virgie: I’m interested in what you were saying about Juba growing up in the Black nationalist movement and the development of his queer identity in this context.

Leroy: Well, he was saying that Black males in that kind of environment could not show disability or weakness. A lot of Black males had diabetes, for example, but it was considered a weakness to change your diet. I think his father had some kind of operation on his legs or something, but even his father being a Black male in that kind of environment had to be strong and go through life without showing the real other side to him.

Patty: Not just with Juba, but with you too. Leroy’s father was in the Black Panthers and was a professional football player, and in developing this piece he explored expectations fathers in general have for their sons, particularly constructions of masculinity in the Black community. They explore how someone who’s queer or disabled fits into that. The piece is really beautiful, quite layered. Essentially, two men in relationship in the South with all of these institutional forces bearing down on them loving each other within that.

Virgie: Any other details about Sins or the upcoming show?

Patty: We can promise a rocking good time at the show! This is our 5^th anniversary performance and we’re going to have visual art in the lobby, something we haven’t done before. We have an interactive Time Machine, video installations, and photographs from Sins over the years – all keeping with the theme of stories over time and geography.

Virgie: What’s the preparation leading up to the show – these last few weeks before the performances – like for you?

Patty: As the artistic director I immerse myself in all of the stories, in all of the visuals – I dream Sins. Literally. This is the creative process – we gestate for months and months, but now, this is birth. These are weeks where we’re in labor, it’s all there. Right now, I work from 8am to 1am every day because there’s a ton of work that needs to happen. While it’s incredibly gratifying to do a workshop and see 30 or 40 people’s thoughts change, it’s that experience cubed to go into a theatre and see people’s thoughts change but more, to feel people’s hearts change. It’s a transformative experience for the audience. It’s a transformative experience for us. There’s an alchemy to performance. We have to bring all of our pain and our joy into this process and our technical skills. It’s deep. It’s fun. It’s excitement and stress and it’s more.

Virgie: As I’m sitting here with both of you, I hear a sense of love and generosity that I – as a political activist myself – have a hard time maintaining or embodying. I often feel that my political work comes from a place of anger, frustration and urgency. And I was wondering what words you have for other political activists who are doing difficult work.

Leroy: I think in my 40s I’m really looking at the term “activist” and really enlarging it. As we are coming up as activists, we’re hammered that an activist is someone who goes on the protest line, and now I’m rejecting that definition and seeing that art is activism, and that you don’t need to kill your body to be an activist. It could be someone with one blog, and they could be a media activist. It would be great to have young people really think about that and come into their own knowledge about activism. There are other ways to be an activist.

Patty: When we started Sins, I had been working at the Center for Genetics and Society directing a project on Race, Disability and Eugenics. I had to do a lot of work, basically, justifying my existence as a queer person, as a person of color, as a person with a disability, as a woman, saying “Don’t de-select embryos that are brown. Don’t de-select embryos that are disabled.” All the while holding that, of course, women always have the right to choose whether or not they carry a pregnancy to term. But deciding what kind of pregnancy? If it’s going to be a fat baby, or if it’s going to be a brown-skinned baby, or if it’s going to be a female baby and you don’t want it? That’s eugenics. In my position I had to read a lot of material about choosing whose life was considered worth having, really negative material, eugenics history in the US, which framed us as disposable. I was so excited when we started Sins, because in this vision we just assume that all bodies and all communities are valuable. That’s the baseline: that every body is beautiful and irreplaceable. Not just that we have rights, or that the world is horrific and we need justice – yes, of course. But let’s move a little more deeply, the nature of being human is a beautiful experience, we are beautiful and valuable. Let’s use that as our starting point.

Learn more about Sins Invalid and buy tickets to their upcoming show at www.SinsInvalid.org.