1.
I suppose this in some ways is my origin story. Though I’ve come to understand that I, like perhaps many or all of you, have more than one.
2.
I bought my first kilt in September 2007, during the Folsom Street Fair. How to describe the Folsom Street Fair? Folsom is an exceptionally well curated event that includes a stunning breadth and depth of BDSM scenes or performances, if you will; booths or stalls selling all sorts of BDSM gear; organizations that promote safe, sane, and consensual BDSM; companies that produce BDSM porn, and porn in general; BDSM-focused or inspired artists and craftsmen; and corporate (of course) entities that might in some way benefit from an association with the folks that frequent such an event. Among so much else.
But this is not a story about the street fair itself. While I have any number of certifiable kinks that might’ve brought me to Folsom, the real driver behind my attendance that first year was, in truth, the simple freedom of it all. The city of San Francisco, once upon a liberated time, didn’t necessarily permit nudity but it didn’t outlaw it either. There’s a local legend (by which I mean the actual person, not the story of them) who used to walk through the Castro naked, regularly (I believe they lived there or nearby) presumably because a) they could and b) they took pleasure from doing so. And though they’ve since outlawed workaday nudity the city still (for however long it lasts) grants a special permit to the Folsom folks to allow full nudity on the fairgrounds (roughly five square blocks of city streets south of Market) for whosoever desires.
Setting: outdoors. A fat Black man kneels on the ground, in front of a metal sculpture. He’s wearing a black tee shirt with an image of white bird wings and the word EAGLE in all caps across them, a black wool kilt, neon pink calf-high socks, and combat boots. One knee is on the ground; he rests his arms on the raised knee. The underside of his kilt is exposed, as if blown up by a strong wind – but only darkness is visible.
3.
I’m currently reading Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good by Adrienne Maree Brown, an exceptionally well curated collection of essays by her and others, and interviews or conversations between her and others, that rather than describe I’ll let you discover for yourself. I mention this primarily to tell you that the reason I’m reading the book is because I wrote a poem, a cento, made up entirely of titles of Sun Ra compositions and albums, that ends with the words pleasure, immeasurable (I’m pleased with the slant rhyme if nothing else) which I’ve been considering placing as the concluding poem in what’s shaping up to be my second poetry collection. Except: I (some I from somewhere inside) had started to question whether a fat Black queer person who wants to be engaged in a movement for catalytic change and true liberation ought to end a poem, much less a full collection of poems, on the notion of immeasurable pleasure? Is this – pleasure – a serious enough endeavor? Is it too trivial? So, like I hate to admit I sometimes do, I began to look for external permission to do what I already knew I wanted to do, to end this collection on the notion of pleasure-seeking as a goal. And I came across this revelation of a work. Suffice it to say: permission granted.
4.
Perhaps this all reads as obscene to y’all but I already said I’m fat Black and queer so for a goodly percentage of the nation/world I, by virtue of my literal composition, by definition, wallow in the obscene, do I not? Please understand, I ever aim to embrace the obscene. If you’re still reading, this is no surprise to you.
5.
When I say I’m currently “reading” Pleasure Activism what I mean is I’ve been listening to Adrienne Marie Brown’s (exceptionally pleasurable) narration of the work on Audible™ which I didn’t want to admit you, reader, because I’ve got a mountain or five of books I’ve bought whose covers I’ve not cracked and listening to a book doesn’t to my wiring sounds especially literary or academic or poetic or intellectual or whatever other such thing a serious poet ought to be or model or manifest.
6.
A brief description of my baggage: it’s always overpacked and nevertheless manages to be consistently inappropriate, whatever the current climate.
7.
It’s not accurate to say I bought my first kilt at Folsom. For the occasion of my first Folsom Street Fair, I’d bought (months before) a chainmail garment, which, depending on who you ask, would fall somewhere, on the spectrum of unbifurcated garments, between a kilt and a loincloth. (I found this garment at the Leather Rack, a now-defunct Washington, DC store catering to leatherfolk.) I’d planned and saved for this trip for months, and took it, the loincloth/kilt, the trip, from Washington DC to San Francisco, alone. (I didn’t believe my impending liberation could withstand the weight of witnesses. No witnesses I’d have to see ever again, at any rate.) So – I went into one of the port-a-johns at the street fair and changed from my shorts into my chainmail loincloth/kilt (and nothing else but black socks and boots and sunglasses designed to hide my eyes) and stepped out into the sunny day. (Folsom always has a clothes check.) And almost immediately, what I felt was free. The sun hitting my skin. The sense of transgression – of not merely being nearly nude but not being technically nude while flouting (flouncing) the conventions of workaday male dress and of presenting my not-nude self in a way where I might as well have been. Y’all, the looks I got. Within this consensual space, the solicitation of the gaze of others. (Is exhibitionism a kink?) I felt – shockingly, to pretty much every part of myself – comfortable. I was enjoying – not merely being seen but being seen how I wanted to be seen. To say I felt pleasure is as close as I can come to describing my state of selfness in that moment.
8.
In a 2019 interview with ColorLines Adrienne Maree Brown defines pleasure as “about happiness, joy, contentment and satisfaction…pure aliveness and actually being present for the world around you.” That’s how I felt, in that moment, wearing my chainmail loincloth/kilt. And as I luxuriated in that sensibility – which, if I think about it, I had no recollection of having felt, at least with that intensity, at any previous point in my (admittedly, relatively speaking) untroubled life – I came across a vendor at the fair, a white guy with long somewhat matted brown hair who was selling a line of kilts he created called Utilikilts™, which might be thought of as descendants of the traditional Scottish kilt but are nevertheless quite different, and I tried one on and it felt like I’d discovered a hack, as they say, how I could walk through the workaday world maintaining this sense of pleasure for as long as possible. That was the beginning. I’ve since come to understand that donning any unbifurcated garment – a kilt, a sarong, a caftan – brings me that same sense of pleasure, of selfness.
9.
I strive always to be relentlessly honest. Which is to say: lest y’all think I’m fully saved, liberated, what have you – I am emphatically not. If you only knew the contortions I go through every time I consider donning a kilt, etc. in a non-BDSM or non-queer space. I am, as ever, a work-in-progress. One of my resolutions for the New Year is to wear a kilt on a cross-country airplane trip, because it’ll represent me letting go of what others think, enough to allow myself the selfness/pleasure I don’t need to earn, but rather, that I was born deserving. (Seriously, if you haven’t read/heard Pleasure Activism, do.) I’m taking baby steps. Just this week I met friend for lunch at a local restaurant. I wore black V-neck tee shirt and a simply wrapped black sarong around my waist, which stopped a couple inches short of my ankles, and black sandals. Yes, my fat Black cisgender “male”-reading ass got some looks as I entered, but none of them melted me. Well, one came close. But that look was from the waiter wearing the tight stretch jeans over his thick, thick thighs, and I read that look as one of appreciation. So I was good.
10.
I feel like the important work of my life going forward is to become comfortable, not only in my own skin, but in what I wear over it. And, in a larger sense, in the pursuit of pleasure, as an end. Without needing permission. Which is to say: if you invite me to read or speak or to dinner or to the laundromat, chances are I’ll be wearing a kilt. Or some similarly unbifurcated garment. We good?
A Black man, with a shaved bald head and a salt-and-pepper beard, wearing a white V-neck tee shirt, stands against a violet-blue backdrop. His head is slightly tilted to the right; he’s smiling, and maybe questioning too.
About the Author
Jubi Arriola-Headley (he/they) is a Blacqueer poet, a storyteller, a first-generation United Statesian (the son of Bajan immigrants), and author of the poetry collection original kink (Sibling Rivalry Press), and recipient of the 2021 Housatonic Book Award. He’s a 2018 PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow, holds an MFA from the University of Miami, and has received support for his work from Millay Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center, the Palm Beach Poetry Festival, Lambda Literary, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts. Jubi and his poems have been featured in Literary Hub, The Rumpus, Beloit Poetry Journal, Nimrod, Southern Humanities Review, Washington Square Review, PBS NewsHour’s Brief But Spectacular, & elsewhere. Jubi lives with his husband in South Florida, on Tequesta and Seminole lands, and his work explores themes of masculinity, vulnerability, rage, tenderness & joy. Black Lives Matter. Trans Lives Matter. Stop Asian Hate. Art is Labor. Abolish Policing. Eat the Rich. Stay Kinky. Free Palestine.