Cunt (18 page)

Home Alive is a collective of performance and visual artists (and other freaks) hell
bent on fighting all forms of violence and oppression including rape, domestic abuse,
gay/lesbian bashing, racism, etc. We support people choosing any form of self defense
that is necessary to survive in any given situation. Examples of self defense are
verbal boundary setting, walking friends to cars or houses, locking doors, planning
escape routes, de-escalation techniques, using pepper spray, physical striking techniques,
fighting, yelling, martial arts, knives, guns, other weapons—ANYTHING that keeps us
alive.

Since the brutal rape and murder of Mia Zapata on July 7, 1993, we are dedicated to
presenting an on-going series of high intensity music, art, spoken word, theater,
film and video events that raise money to provide our community with free and affordable
self defense workshops, educational material, resource information and a nagging reminder
that none of us are safe.

Because I didn’t know Mia, I didn’t feel the intensity of grief a lot of people around
here felt, but it made me really paranoid to the point where I felt I was losing my
mind. For about three months, I lived in a state of terror, where I became afraid
of everyone I knew, everyone I met, everyone I saw. I even became afraid of myself.
I felt this vast rage, like I wanted to kill someone, but I didn’t know who. That
was very frightening. I’d never felt like that before.

But what I did was, I wrote a play called
Again.
It was all about sexual violence and abuse and the fact that your own sexuality seems
to invite danger. I spent a lot of time asking myself how I can still be a sexual
person, while at the same time warding off dangerous situations. Having my sexuality
at the surface is very important to me, and I’m not willing to give it up. Somewhere
inside myself, I suddenly believed that in order to get through this life without
being raped, I had to give up my sexuality.

So, I wrote
Again.
I didn’t pursue having it produced because I wasn’t sure that it wouldn’t make people
feel more afraid and disempowered, which is not what I’m trying to do with my work
at all.

Recently, my friend was telling me he was reading this book about serial killers.
When he’d read about half of it, he threw the book out the eleventh-story window of
his apartment because he felt it was some kind of evil totem. He wasn’t learning anything
from it, it was only exacerbating a fear he already had, and the book was debilitating
him.

The way he described it to me sounded like that terror I felt after Mia’s death, but
also what I felt like when I was finished writing
Again.
It helped me, the individual, deal with my fear, but as a piece of art, I felt more
like it would debilitate society in general.

There wasn’t enough hope in it.

I still have so much fear of my sexuality. I hope to someday produce something to
honor my sexuality, but right now, my relationship with my sexuality is colored by
how other people respond to it, which I distrust greatly.

People seem to have a hard time responding to a woman’s sexuality without having the
desire to literally touch it. I guess in some ways, sexuality implies that, but I
don’t think sexuality necessarily invites someone else to participate. I don’t want
people to interpret my work as an invitation to fuck me.

I did read
Again
a few times, at a couple small theaters and a nightclub. There’s one part where the
woman character is describing what she finds erotic to a man who wants to have sex
with her, but she does not want to have sex with him. She talks about listening to
the rain gush into a gutter, watching a woman dip her finger in her latté and lick
the foam off her finger, and someone taking their shirt off and having another one
on underneath. She’s telling him all these things that have nothing to do with intercourse,
and often nothing to do with other people, in an effort to explain her idea of sexual
eroticism to him.

After I read this at the nightclub, a friend of mine told me an acquaintance of his
came up after my performance and said, “Who’s that? I’d like to bone her.” I was amazed.
Was this guy listening to what I was saying? The character was telling a man exactly
what she did not want from him and this guy thought I, the writer, would want that?
That I’d want to be “boned”?

In
Letters to a Young Poet,
Rilke says, “The highest form of love is to be the protector of another person’s
solitude.” That’s what I want. For other people to love each other without having
to
partake
in them, to
possess
them, to allow them to be their own inside their solitude, to protect that. I wish
people respected each other’s aloneness. I wish I could write something very beautiful
and erotic without worrying about people wanting to use me to fulfill some fantasy—which
I have no control over, and often, has nothing to do with me—inside themselves. (Kristen
Kosmas, writer and performer)

When Mia died, it was like, “This is something that happens to
other people.”
I mean, it happens all the time. A woman is raped in this country every four minutes,
but for someone you know to be raped and murdered, someone so strong .. . It’s hard
to talk about the effect Mia’s death had on other women in the community. Mia’s rape
and murder wasn’t just one isolated event, unto to itself. It happened in a really
vocal, outspoken community of women, who were already trying to find their voice.
A lot of people say, “I didn’t know her, but I felt moved to do something about her
dying the way she did.”

There’s also a general, unifying feeling of rage in the community. Rape and murder
will inspire that, regardless. Like [the young woman mentioned earlier who was abducted
by two men]. She’s still alive, and there was a huge response to her attack.

I teach self-defense in the community to instill in women the idea that no one has
any more or less power than anyone else. What happened to [the young woman mentioned
earlier], to Zolah Lippe [a Seattle writer who committed suicide in 1995], Kristin
Pfaff [Hole’s bass player, who overdosed on heroin] and Stephanie Sargent [7 Year
Bitch’s guitar player, who also overdosed on heroin]—it’s all related in the sense
that within the span of every minute, a woman dies in some fucked-up way, based upon
her belief that she is powerless.

I started performing because I had to. It was a natural progression of what I was
already doing. I make a difference and have an effect—it’s not that I think people
will see me perform and view violence against women in a completely different way,
but I am definitely part of a larger thing which effects change. Often people either
don’t want to, or aren’t used to seeing women angry. Not emotional, not upset, just
angry. Not reactionary anger, necessarily, the anger of just being a woman. My anger
serves me. It gives me a lot of energy. Sometimes, it hurts, which is the flip side
of the same coin. But, I’m happy. I like my life. I like being free to express my
rage. (Cristien Storm, spoken word performer, self-protection instructor, co-founder
of Home Alive)

My life profoundly changed [after Mia Zapata’s death] because Home Alive started out
of that, and it’s been one of the major focuses of my life.

My personal habits have changed dramatically as well. I used to hop on the bus alone
late at night, walk around late at night. I don’t do that at all anymore. I always
ask my female friends how they’re getting home at night and if they don’t have a ride,
I’ll drive them. I never leave my friends without asking them if they need a ride
home and they do the same for me. The whole “Okay, see you later, bye!” thing just
does not happen in my life anymore.

Self-defense is something you have to work on consistently and practice. Cristien
[Storm] is a fine example of a woman who practices self-defense. I never took self-defense
before Home Alive started.

I’ve still never shot a loaded gun, but I’ve taken gun classes. I respect other people’s
choices to have a gun in their life and use it as a form of self-defense. I know a
lot of women who have guns and that’s their business. I don’t feel comfortable with
guns. However, we live in a society where guns are quite prevalent. You never know
when there’s gonna be a situation where a gun might be present, so you might want
to know how to use one.

A big part of the philosophy of Home Alive is that people have to make their own choices
about self-defense. Anything they’re comfortable with, that makes them feel safe and
keeps them alive is the right choice. (Gretta Harley, musician, co-founder of Home
Alive)

A couple of years ago, I woke up at three in the morning to this knock on my door.
My friend was standing there, scared and crying. She hadn’t been feeling well and
couldn’t sleep, so she had gone for a walk. She was walking by the park a few blocks
from here and this car started stalking her. Later she didn’t know why, but she thought
she’d be safe if she hid in the women’s bathroom. He found her and went into the bathroom.
They struggled for a while and I think she did the “I could be your sister” thing
and he finally went away. That’s when she came to my house. I imagine her walking
those three short blocks and how frightened she must have been. Later on, we had to
go back to the bathroom to find her glasses, which she lost when she was struggling
with the man. That was very terrifying, even though there were three of us.

The next night was the Olympia Art Walk and the streets were full of people walking
around town. I’d been projecting images on the Arts Center’s wall across the street
from my apartment building, so we worked feverishly all that afternoon making a slide
show to let people know what had happened the night before. We projected a description
of the man and his car, when and where he tried to attack my friend. It was really
strange to see people’s reactions to it because since we didn’t have much time, the
images were really cartoony so people kinda laughed until they understood we made
this because our friend almost got raped the night before, three blocks away from
where they were standing. Then they were like, “Oh, that’s right over there.”

No matter how strong you are, no matter how safe you are, no matter how lucky or crafty
you are, you still might be put in a position where you could get hurt. That kinda
might be depressing to some people, but I think as long as you’re aware of that reality,
you might actually make it to the moon if you’re a rocket scientist. [Laughs.] You
might survive.

Also, realizing that you might not have everything you need to survive makes it more
likely that you’ll seek out other people to help you. Like when my friend came to
my door that night. She could’ve run up to the park and screamed, knowing someone
would’ve opened their window and helped her, but she knew we’d hold her instead of
just providing her with a place to be removed from the danger.

I thought about that a lot when I was working on the
Free to Fight
album, which is this really great collaboration project Candyass Records put together.
It was so cool when I got this lovely letter from Donna Dresch, saying they were gonna
be putting out this record and asking me to contribute. I was like, “Oh, wow!” I don’t
really know how the whole thing came about, but it seemed like a great idea to me,
an amazing thing to be a part of.

Anyway, during the
Free to Fight
tour, there were self defense workshops before each show. Self-defense is something
I’ve never taken the time out to learn, but this was really cool because it was right
there. It was very beautiful. Everybody lined up in three rows, the whole room was
shouting in unison. Three girls would go up at the same time and do the move while
everyone else yelled and cheered them on. So many voices. It made me so happy. The
workshops made people feel good about themselves, like, “I can do this!” It wasn’t
like, “You better do this because the world’s scary and people are out to get you.”
It wasn’t inspired by paranoia or anything. It taught me that I already do a lot of
these things, I just never thought of it as self-defense before. Everybody has their
own way of defending themselves, they just never think of it as such. Simple things
like walking tall, talking loudly, crossing the street.

Last night I was at a show in Seattle. I went outside to get some fresh air and there
was a girl standing there near me. These two guys walked up and asked her what was
going on inside and all these other questions. They weren’t being assholes or anything,
but I stayed near, even though I’d gotten enough fresh air. I didn’t want to leave
her alone outside with these two guys. I stood there until they left and then I went
back inside. That was self-defense. (Nikki McClure, performance artist)