People keep trying to give me a public identity with the difficult parts removed.
Keep the creativity. Keep the confidence. Perhaps leave a little sexuality in the lighting. But make the history respectable, the language acceptable, and the person easy to defend.
Black Glass comes from the parts that arrangement would cut.
My books, songs, images, and environments carry pieces of the same life. Even the colors are personal. My actual studio is black and dark cherry wood, with purple, blue, and pink light. The atmosphere people encounter in the work is an atmosphere I choose to live in.
The sexuality is just as personal.
In an earlier part of my life, I was house mom at a trap house. I sold an experience, listened to what clients said, and watched what happened when their public identities no longer had an audience. Some of those encounters taught me exactly how conditional a person’s convictions could become.
That is part of what I put into Black Glass. I’m interested in the person who appears when the performance of respectability stops. What do they ask for? What do they admit? And how do they treat the person who now knows?
My experience has made me deeply suspicious of acceptance that requires an edited account of who I am. I won’t erase my desires to make someone else’s defense of me easier. I won’t pretend the erotic parts of my life are separate from the imagination they helped shape.
Aurelia gives one fragment of that imagination a voice. Other fragments become characters, clothes, rooms, or other songs. Their consistency comes from the person behind them.
You can disagree with that person. You can dislike the history or recognize something in it that makes you uncomfortable. I’m willing to have that argument.
But I’m not going to tell you the room was empty.
I was in it.