Gina

I used to work on the market on Saturdays, and after school on Thursdays and Fridays, packing up. I used the money to buy books. I smuggled them inside and hid them under the mattress. Anybody with a single bed, standard size, and a collection of paperbacks, standard size, will know that 72 per layer can be accommodated under the mattress. By degrees my bed began to rise visibly, like the Princess and the Pea, so that soon I was sleeping closer to the ceiling than to the floor. My mother was suspicious-minded, but even if she had not been, it was clear that her daughter was going up in the world.

One night she came in and saw the corner of a paperback sticking out from under the mattress. She pulled it out and examined it with her flashlight. It was an unlucky choice; DH Lawrence, Women in Love. Mrs Winterson knew that Lawrence was a satanist and a pornographer, and, hurling it out of the window, she rummaged and rifled and I came tumbling off the bed while she threw book after book out of the window and into the backyard. I was grabbing books and trying to hide them, the dog was running off with them, my dad was standing helpless in his pyjamas.

When she had done, she picked up the little paraffin stove we used to heat the bathroom, went into the yard, poured paraffin over the books and set them on fire. I watched them blaze and blaze and remember thinking how warm it was, how light, on the freezing Saturnian January night. I had bound them all in plastic because they were precious. Now they were gone.

In the morning there were stray bits of texts all over the yard and in the alley. Burnt jigsaws of books. I collected some of the scraps. What does Eliot say? These fragments I have shored against my ruins …

I realised something important: whatever is on the outside can be taken away at any time. Only what is inside you is safe. I began to memorise texts. We had always memorised long chunks of the Bible, and it seems that people in oral traditions have better memories than those who rely on printed text. The rhythm and image of poetry make it easier to recall than prose, easier to chant. But I needed prose too, and so I made my own concise versions of 19th-century novels – going for the talismanic, not worrying much about the plot. I had lines inside me – a string of guiding lights. I had language.

You slip the record, still in its dust sleeve, out of the album jacket, and then you very gingerly slip the record out of its dust sleeve, being careful to only touch your fingertips to the very edges of the record, the label, and the spindle hole. “Oil from your hands is bad for the vinyl,” Dad said to me, but I’m not sure how true that is, whether that’s something Ma told Dad because it would actually protect the integrity of the vinyl, or something she told him because she was paranoid he’d ruin her records unless There Were Strict Rules. You set the record onto the player. You set the record player’s dial to 33 1/3. You lift the needle so that the record starts spinning, but you don’t drop the needle yet. You take out the vinyl cleaning tools, the soft velvety buffer with the tiny red bottle of cleaning fluid smartly tucked into its wooden handle, and the accompanying tiny brush. You brush the dust off the buffer with the tiny brush, you apply cleaning solution to only one edge of the buffer, and then you – gently! – run the buffer over the spinning record. First the edge with the cleaning solution, then the flatter part of the buffer to dry the cleaner off of the record. You brush any dust off the buffer with the little brush again. You nudge the needle over the record. Then you let it drop.

I remember this like it was yesterday, the same way I can recite half a dozen Catholic prayers at the drop of a hat even though my last catechism class was eighth grade. At 16, I loved the ritual of it, how it bordered on fetish, this weird little spell I’d cast to the gods of music and sex before I’d get lost in the reverie of whatever rockstar obsessed me that week. Putting a record on was a full-body sensory experience, something you had to do with care and intention, with the right kind of touch and attention to detail. Not unlike fucking, I was learning. That summer, the summer that everything was electric and shimmering, I’d put on the giant geeky headphones my dad had found at a garage sale, the ones that cocooned my ears entirely and made the music my whole world. I’d drop the needle onto Hounds of Love and lie on the living room floor and writhe.

See, my kinky leather identity grew firmly out of my queerness and my feminism. All three of those elements are important, and in some ways inseparable, dependent on one another. It’s important to me to pursue the sort of social justice that ensures that our consensual relationships are someday entered into from a place of roughly equal societal power. Without that aim, we’re simply perpetuating oppression.

Let me be clear: I am not saying that we need to wait until after the revolution to have the kind of sex and/or play that we want. I’m saying that we cannot turn a blind eye to the institutionalized power imbalances that affect our interpersonal relations when we’re negotiating our consensual power exchanges. To do so is venal and corrosive. To do so with a shrug and a nod to the tired catchphrase “your kink is OK” is offensive.

There, I said it.