Black Glass comes from an old life of mine. I was the house mom at a trap house, selling the “shemale sex partner experience.” That was the language of the world I worked in. I know what happened in those rooms because I was there.
I met men whose private behavior bore very little resemblance to the person they presented outside. Men with reputations, relationships, opinions about morality—and desires they expected someone else to keep secret. Some publicly condemned the very people they privately sought out.
Then the door closed.
I heard what they wanted. I watched their confidence change. I saw the distance between what they said they believed and what they asked for when they thought nobody who mattered was watching.
I mattered. Apparently, being trusted with someone’s secrets didn’t always mean being counted as a person whose judgment mattered.
There is power in seeing that contradiction clearly. There is also a peculiar intimacy in knowing something about a person that their public world may never know. They could leave the room and return to their respectable lives. I still knew who had been there.
That experience lives inside Black Glass: the invitation, the attention, the things people reveal when desire gets ahead of their rehearsed identity. So does my understanding that being desired and being respected are very different experiences.
I don’t consider my sexuality an embarrassing detail to remove from my creative history. It shaped my perception, my relationships, my anger, and my sense of power. Cleaning that history up would leave you with a more comfortable story and a less truthful song.
Aurelia carries a fragment of that experience. Her voice gives it another form. The glass is dark, but I remember what I saw through it.