Tori Amos, Avgi Saketopoulou, & Love of Dick

There is nothing quite like sex to elucidate what a liar you are...

I could write much more about Avgi Saketopoulou’s influence on my thinking than you would likely read. As many of you know, I have been immersed in a two-year writing program called DRAFT, working with Joshua Mohr, Pam Houston, and Samantha Dunn. For my upcoming manuscript critique, I have selected Samantha Dunn as my mentor to help me finish my memoir, which has recently been deeply revised due to Avgi’s influence. Close friends are no doubt growing weary of hearing me rave about her. But I can’t help it; I become obsessed with artists and thinkers who radically impact me. How could I not? I take them in aesthetically, allowing them to pollinate me and reorganize the bloom of myself.

The first time in my life this happened, I was nineteen, a first-year ministry school student in Austin, Texas. After discovering Tori Amos at a record store, I bought four of her albums on the spot. I went home and listened to them consecutively, well into the middle of the night. From the first track on Boys For Pele, I experienced a refraction in faith, an initiation that altered the trajectory of my life—I do not mean this hyperbolically. I began connecting online with other fans, collecting bootleg recordings, reading every printed interview, and watching any clip I could find. I acquired her book recommendations, starting with Robert A. Johnson’s Owning Your Own Shadow. Then, Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces, Carl Jung’s Man and His Symbols, Marion Woodman’s Dancing In the Flames, and many more. For the next many years, I followed Tori’s tours, seeing her live dozens of times (nothing compared to a friend who stopped counting after five hundred). Any serious Tori fan will testify to the ineffability of her live performances, especially during her zenith.

Before Tori’s music, I did not have an adequate psychic blueprint for the soul work ahead of me. I was becoming a minister but struggling to maintain a connection to my spirituality. At the same time, I was secretly having sex with men. Tori became a carrier wave, bringing me so close to coming out of the closet that I almost dropped out of ministry school.

Until I was attacked in the country outside Austin by two men who told me repeatedly they were going to kill me because they rightly suspected I was gay. A detailed account of my escape from this attempted hate crime serves as an obvious hinge moment in my memoir; and that harrowing experience continues to exert an undulating influence over my body, in surprising ways.

For a while, I’ve been feeling stuck with my narrator. It’s not that he doesn’t have his merits: for one, he is dedicated to elucidating, viscerally, the shame that undergirds masculinity’s tenuous edifice vis-à-vis graphic sex with men, both strangers and lovers. These scenes are often lead magnets that grab readers’ attention…but once he has it, he clams up. By now, I have been waiting for his revelations for a couple of years. And recently, the more I spend time with him, the less I like him because, ultimately, he wants me (and you) to feel sorry for him. And that’s becoming increasingly more difficult the longer I wait. And learn.

Bizarrely, I cannot remember how I discovered Avgi Saketopoulou, an outspoken, queer psychoanalyst in New York City who extensively challenges psychoanalysis in its overt allegiance to Whiteness and binary gender. What I do remember is her immediate, penetrative effect on me. I began compulsively reading her published books and papers, listening to her interviews, and reading other analysts she references. Her work continues to shape me personally, professionally, and artistically. And in the brain of my narrator, her incandescent writings on gender, race, and the ethics of violence have been aggregating. He is beginning to speak up, and I am intensely interested.