Things you should know

This year, 2008, it can be over now.

2008:

Today I got an email from a teenager in a group home asking for advice on “getting into” the industry because he is about to become homeless and live on the streets. This year: the woman whose boyfriend wouldn’t stop choking her during sex. The woman who couldn’t stop bleeding after sex, and the other woman whose sexual trauma from childhood destroyed her relationship and she was writing me at her darkest hour. The man who was raped as a boy who I sent to a fantastic therapist. The person who stumbled across pornography so horrifying online that I put them in touch with the FBI. The couple who tried a sex act and one of them went into anaphylactic shock — after the ER trip, we deduced that it was an ingredient in the lube they were using.

The dozens of emails I got asking if the person emailing is “normal” for being aroused by a fantasy they find offensive or morally questionable in real life. Several emails from women who can’t have an orgasm and need specific answers to everything they’re trying. Three from parents whose 13 or 14 year-olds are going to have sex and they can’t stop them, and need advice so the kids make the right decisions. Seven heartbreaking emails from people going through breakups where something sexual was the final break. One from a woman who was cheated on.

Two international regular emailers who asked advice and keep me posted on their gender transitions, the toll it’s taking on work and keeping jobs, and struggle to stay in their marriages when their spouses reject them regularly. The senior in high school whose friends regard her as their sex advice resource — she needed my advice. The guy with genital injuries asked what safe toys he should try. I can’t count how many times I’ve been told this year I am the “only one” they can “ask for help.” Dozens of emails about safer sex referrals and advice. At least ten people placed successfully with therapists.

This year, 2008:

* named: Wired’s Faces of Innovation 2008
* awarded: SFBG’s Best of the Bay 2008
* times I was interviewed by large international corporations for tech development advice: 5; 4 paid, 3 recorded
* number of times I was told to kill myself: 32 (that I know of)
* number of death threats I received: 3
* police reports I made: 3
* times I have attempted to obtain restraining orders: 2
* restraining orders I was granted: 0
* number of times my address and phone number were posted online: 1
* number of times I was asked for help from others dealing with online stalkers: 6
* number of strangers who wrote me for help: see above
* number of strangers who told me I “saved” their life: see above
* number of boyfriends who told me they can’t cope with the hatred directed at me: one
* number of times the Wikipedia page about me was vandalized or falsified: dozens, possibly near a hundred; it has been locked and is currently “move prevented due to vandalism”
* who called me a liar with no substantiation: BoingBoing, Valleywag, AVN (not counting trolls/stalkers)
* number of “anon” comments left on my blog with statements like “eat shit and die bitch”: 14
* number of free phones I was sent, with accounts: 5
* times I was recognized in public by total strangers: about 50% of the time I left the house
* books I authored and edited, released: 5
* books and publications I was featured or quoted in: 4 books, publications too numerous to count
* lectures I have presented about sexual health and technology, from ETech to UCSF/SFSI.org: 9
* number of times I have been invited / allowed to see my disabled ex-husband: one
* blogs I’ve launched: 2 (artmachines.org, violetbluesf.com)
* highest number of comments on my San Francisco sex column: 1369 (Fear of A Gay Planet) That column also got me the most “kill yourself” suggestions.

So many friends get mad at me for not returning their emails.

I fucking hate the holidays. When I saw “Milk” last week, I cried and cried and cried. Not just because it’s a heart-wrencher of a story, but because I suddenly didn’t feel SO ALONE. Like I do tonight. I decorated the xmas tree at the Hat Factory today: I didn’t know how to do it.

Today I went to the Blue Front Cafe, where I’ve been going for 18 years, for a sandwich. They were playing The Police. They’ve been playing anything Sting-related since that dude made an album. I wanted to call Jessie and tell her, “Hanny’s STILL playing Sting!” But Jessie killed herself a couple years ago. So I took this picture; it looks like her more than me.

I was born in the San Francisco Bay Area to a mother who was a Stanford engineering graduate and Oakland native that worked in Silicon Valley. My father was a San Francisco native whom I never met but was told had died, then later my mom told me he disappeared after returning from service in the Navy. I grew up in a single mother household estranged from family members, and was surrounded by adults who worked at technology companies such as Atari and were steeped in Bay Area drug culture. I was reading at an early age and was repeatedly IQ tested at Stanford before age ten. In kindergarten I was placed in a fourth grade reading class while my home life descended into violence, drugs, crime and poverty.

At age ten my mother had quit working in the technology sector and exclusively dealt cocaine and marijuana, prompting us to move frequently around San Francisco, the East Bay and South Bay. After my mom witnessed a drug related murder and was raped by a dealer, my mother participated in a sting operation bust of her associates at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in San Francisco and placed us into a witness protection program where my mother was given a new identity, social security number and relocated. However, she quickly became re-immersed in cocaine addiction and drug dealing, showing me at age 13 how to prepare and ready crack cocaine for (her) consumption. She offered it to me. I tried it once and didn’t like “feeling funny.” Witnessing beatings, watching my mother’s physical and emotional abuse from her boyfriends, and finally fearing rape when my mother would leave me alone for the night with her drug customers, I left home (a rental in the Sunset District) on the eve of my 14th birthday. (I have not seen or spoken to her since I was 20, when I reconnected with her and she “borrowed” all the money I had — and she disappeared. She told me that for work, she was “running” speed in Oakland. I gave her the money because she told me she needed it for her overdue phone bill. It was money I’d saved to buy books so I could take classes in community college.)

I relied on schoolmates (and their families) for food, shelter and connections to teen street culture for nearly a year, pretending to attend high school. After the freshman year was over, I went fully into homeless street culture, surviving among a group of homeless punk youths who taught me how to obtain food and shelter on the streets. I panhandled, engaged in petty theft, slept in abandoned cars, on rooftops and in parks, obtained food and clothing through “dumpster diving” and kept a journal. Avoiding street drug culture and sex work, I befriended the night shift at Kinko’s and slept on the rooftop when not working on self-published written ‘zines about street life, sex and politics. I was so excited when I was first published in “Filth” — a famous Upper Haight ‘zine.

I never did sex work. I never once did hard drugs, or really any soft ones for that matter. It was boring; I’d seen it at home. I already knew what it could all do to a person. I didn’t want to become my mother. Despite the influences of the streets to trust no one, I was befriended by a stranger while panhandling one night outside a bar who taught me how to work in a restaurant kitchen in exchange for food, giving me a marketable job skill. He said, “You need food, come by at 11am. Work for an hour and we’ll feed you.” I was a prep cook with a mowhawk for lunchtime noodles. At the same time, a gay male couple took in a number of street youths (including me) and allowed us kids to work for money and use the address of the cafe they owned, enabling me to secure identification so I could enter the work force. At age 17 I secured my second job at a coffee shop, and moved into a crumbling Victorian apartment for $142 a month.

18 was a whole new chapter.

Now you know.